


still moving regardless

by thisstableground



Series: less than ninety degrees [24]
Category: Do No Harm (TV), In the Heights - Miranda/Hudes
Genre: Multi, Reunited and It Feels So Good, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-07
Updated: 2020-01-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:54:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22164397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisstableground/pseuds/thisstableground
Summary: They've got snacks. They've got the U&R Awesome Roadtrip Singalong Car Jamz (March 2018) playlist. They've got the most beautiful girl in the whole world waiting for them in California.It's time for a goddamn road trip.
Relationships: Ruben Marcado/Usnavi (In the Heights)/Vanessa (In the Heights)
Series: less than ninety degrees [24]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/713601
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Well, we made it this is the last of the reuploads: it's gonna be all brand new fic after this one! Thank you for your patience while I've been tidying up. I know it was a little self-indulgent of me, but I'm so much happier with how the series reads now, and gained a lot of clarity about how I want it to be structured in the future, which makes writing it a much more pleasant experience for me!
> 
> (Also self indulgent of me: the title of this fic is from the same song I took my AO3 handle from. In my defense, it's literally a song about driving through California, what else am I gonna use?)

“Do you think Sonny’s gonna be okay looking after them?”

They were supposed to leave five minutes ago but Ruben’s still standing with his fingers lingering longingly on the ceramic tub of one of his chili plants. They’ve just started to flower. It’s a crucial developmental stage.

“How hard can it be to tip some water over ‘em every other day?” Usnavi’s bouncing on his toes by the door, a puppy who’s been promised a walk that’s taking too long to deliver on.

“Nnnhh,” Ruben says, pained. “Maybe I should’ve called a professional in. It’s a lot of responsibility.“

Usnavi tugs his arm. “Your babies will be fine, Poison Ivy, now come _on_ let’s _go_ you’ve checked everything literally a billion times and I’m _dying_.”

Ruben lets himself be pulled out the apartment, mostly so that he can check over the contents of the rental car one more time before they start. “— phone charger, Vanessa’s birthday present, sunglasses…I think that’s everything. Do you have all your stuff? Did you pack—“

“Sí sí sí sí sí, I packed, I went to the bathroom, I ate breakfast, everything is covered, why are we still here?”

“Alright, alright, I’m done.” Ruben throws his overnight bag in the backseat and slams the door. “You ready?”

“Born ready! _”_ Usnavi says, trying to slide over the hood to the passenger side and falling off halfway.

***

“Ruben,” Usnavi says, about two minutes into the drive while they wait at the lights on 182nd and Broadway. “I think I left my wallet at your place.”

“You did,” Ruben says. “I picked it up off the table when we were leaving, it’s in my bag.”

“You did? ¡Gracias! What would I do without you?”

“I dread to think. Anything else?”

“No,” Usnavi says. “Just the wallet.”

***

“Ruben,” Usnavi says as they hook a right onto 179th. “I think I forgot to pack underwear.”

“I _asked_ if you—”

“And socks. And a toothbrush.”

“There’s a Target near my mom’s, you can pick some up from there.”

“Cool. Sorry. That’s definitely everything.”

***

“Did I lock Vanessa’s apartment?”

“Yes, remember, I made you send me a picture of you doing it so we wouldn’t spend all week worrying?”

“Oh, yeah.” Usnavi looks out the window as the GWB looms up ahead. “Fuck, did I turn the stove off?!”

“Did you turn it _on_?”

“No lo creo,” Usnavi says. “I had takeout last night and pop tarts for breakfast. But maybe?”

Ruben sighs. “Want to go back and check? Last chance, I’m not turning round once we hit Jersey.”

“I’ll get Sonny to look later.”

“Anything else?”

Usnavi opens the glovebox then closes it again without taking anything out. “She don’t have no fish I’m supposed to be feeding or nothing?”

“If she does we haven’t fed them since she left anyway,” Ruben points out. “They dead.”

“Then we’re bueno.” Usnavi nods to himself and whispers “ _born ready!”_

_***_

Jersey flies by in a blur of Usnavi’s roadtrip playlist and Usnavi remembering things he forgot to do before they left and Usnavi’s complaints about Jersey, and before Ruben knows it the horizon turns familiar.

“Walt, my guy!” Usnavi yells as they drive onto the Walt Whitman bridge. “ _I celebrate myself, and sing myself_! Hey, qué pasa, you okay?”

“Mmhm,” Ruben says. They pass under a sign indicating they should change lanes for Philadelphia International Airport and he tightens his hands on the wheel. He knows this place. He knows this route. It doesn’t feel like coming home.

Usnavi assesses him with anxious eyes, quiet for the first time since they started driving. Then he says, “you think they’ll ever name a bridge after you?”

“Why would anyone name a bridge after me?

“On account of how you’re gonna change the world and all.”

“Yeah, right.”

Usnavi says with pure confidence, “you will. More likely you than me, anyways.”

Ruben laughs: it may not be true, but it’s still nice that Usnavi has so much faith in him. “I don’t know about bridges, but I can name a drug after you if you like.”

“Oh, dope! What kinda drug?”

“I guess some kind of super stimulant? Usnavitalin. Ritalin but better.”

Belatedly it occurs to Ruben that they might not be at the joking about ADHD stage yet, but Usnavi just grins at him. “Can you make it coffee flavor?”

“I’ll see what I can do.” 

They take a turn and Ruben knows this route too, he knows it too well. He points out of Usnavi’s window, at the ambulance just pulling into the busy parking lot of Independence Memorial Hospital coming up fast on the right. “Jesus. Speaking of drugs…”

“Is that…?”

“Yep.”

Usnavi stares at the building, twisting in his seat to watch it as they pass. Ruben stares hard at the licence plate in front. He's fine. It’s fine. Already in the rearview. He doesn’t have to go back there. Nobody's gonna make him go back there. Concentrate on driving until eventually they get into the residential streets. He breathes in slowly, Philadelphia spring, trees with late March blossom making the air sweet where it blows in cool through the open window just like the last time he came back after a long time away. He breathes out slowly. “Can you text my mom and tell her we’ll be there in five?”

“Claro.” Usnavi pulls his phone out of where he’s storing it in the cupholder and types, then frowns out at the street around them. “Oh my god,” he says, in a voice of dawning horror. “Ruben, are you from the _suburbs?”_

 _“_ No! Well, yes, a bit, but don’t say it like that, it’s a normal place to live.”

“Does your mom’s house have two floors? Do you have a garage? Do you have a _lawn?”_

“This is us,” Ruben says instead of answering - is it that weird to have a lawn?- as they turn down the street he grew up on _, his_ street. He almost expects Jason to be loitering on the sidewalk, but there's only his neighbor's ancient, ginger cat snoozing in a patch of sun, and all his neighbors houses, in his memory unchanged from when he used to live there. And Ruben's house, too the only thing different about it the For Sale sign up out front. It doesn’t feel like coming home, not until he sees his mamá already standing outside the door waiting for him to arrive.

***

Usnavi wasn’t there for the big moment of reunion when the Marcados came to visit in January but he pictures it being exactly like this right in the middle of the station on 181st, with a crowd of grouchy commuters trying to shove their way past while Estefanía hugs her son, swaying him a little and cooing “mi Rubén, mi Rubén” as if she’s singing a newborn to sleep. Ruben, for his part, seems unembarrassed about letting himself be lullabyed at, and damn right he shouldn’t be. That shit is beautiful.

The moment is interrupted by two very loud sets of feet thundering down the stairs and a shriek of joy. Estefania moves just in time for Ruben to open his arms to Mercedes, who throws herself on her brother in a powerful limpet-like hug and even Paola, who was pretty reserved on their visit, clasps Ruben’s arm tightly with both of hers and sing-songs “¡Ruuu-bueno!”.

“¡Paaao-lita!” Ruben answers and kisses her cheek, his arms too trapped between his excitable sisters to hug back.

Usnavi stands off to the side, happy to let the Marcados have their moment while he plays the role of spare luggage, until Estefanía takes him by the hands, giving him a double cheek kiss of his own.

“Usnavi!” she says. “How are you, cariño? Is Rubén taking good care of you? Rubén, look at this boy, he’s all skin and bone, have you even been feeding him?”

“Of course not,” Ruben says. 

“Rubén Manuel!” Estefanía picks up a stack of mail off the side-table and taps him softly on the arm with it. “I taught you better. Here, these are yours, you open those while I show some hospitality, since you apparently have so many better things to be doing than looking after your poor boyfriend.” She pushes Usnavi gently in front of her. “Vamos, vamos.”

Usnavi ruffles Ruben hair on his way past. “Your mom is my favorite.”

Ruben sticks his tongue out, shuffling his mail in his hands. Paola starts saying “Ruben, did Mom tell you—” but as Usnavi gets to the kitchen there’s a dazzling influx of sizzling sounds and food smells and sunlight from the window so he doesn’t catch the end of it, only a burst of excited noise from the living room at whatever the news was. Estefanía whirlwinds around, taking cutlery out of drawers and stirring something in a skillet, murmuring to herself the exact same way Ruben does whenever he’s cooking and occasionally moving Usnavi to one side or another to get at something on the counter.

“D’you need me to help with anything?” he asks, feeling like he’s getting underfoot in here.

“No no no! You are a guest, you do nothing!” She turns the burners off and smiles at him, picking up a stack of plates. “I just wanted to ask, how have you been since last time I saw you?”

Ah yeah. Last time, when he cried all over her because…she got him a birthday present? Was that really why? It probably made sense at the time, but it already seems like a very long time ago. “I’m doin’ really well, actually.”

“I was worried about you. Ruben worries too.”

“I know he does.” He takes the plates out of her hands, despite her protesting. “Coupla off days here and there, but any fight you’re still standin’ after, ¿verdad?”

Estefania nods. “You look happier. I’m glad. And you are excited to see your Vanessa?”

Dios mio, of course! He’s spent the whole last two weeks forgetting every ten minutes and then remembering and then getting what Usnavi calls _hype_ and what Ruben calls _Usnavi please I’m trying to sleep,_ but then he always smiles back and repeats “we’re going to see Vanessa!” so Usnavi knows he’s just as jazzed about it.

Estefania laughs. “I’ll take that as a yes,” she says, and Usnavi realizes he didn’t actually reply and is just standing there with a huge grin on his face. “It’s a shame we won’t see her—“

“Only bad hosts serve breakfast late, Mom,” Mercedes interrupts from the doorway where all three of the Marcado siblings are suddenly crowded.

“So much for hospitality,” Ruben adds. “Are you making Usnavi carry everything?”

“Ay, the vultures are here,” Estefanía mutters. “Come on, then. I hope I made enough.”

Enough is more than an understatement, and all of it tastes amazing, so there’s distraction enough that it barely registers that Ruben’s very quiet till Usnavi tells Estefania “man, your cooking is unbelievable,” and Ruben abruptly drops his fork.

Everyone goes silent. Ruben stays gazing down at his plate, his hand positioned like he’s still holding something.

“Rubén,” Estafanía says, clear but soft.

Too delayed to be reassuring, Ruben blinks hard and picks up his fork and says, “sorry, what were we talking about?”

“Are you alright?”

“Yes, I was just—thinking about something else, don’t worry about it.”

“Do you need anything? Do you want to take a break? You can eat in your room if you need to.”

“Don’t _worry_ about it,” he repeats, doing that Ruben thing where without moving an inch he seems to shrink, the smallest nesting doll version of himself hidden inside something larger.

Before Estefania can persist, Usnavi puts on his brightest voice and says “so what was everyone yelling about when we was in the kitchen earlier?”

“Oh! I got my first college acceptance letter yesterday!” Paola says. “One of my safeties, but honestly I’m just happy to be going anywhere.”

“Oh, snap, that’s _awesome_! Congratulations! Man, you’re a real family of brainiacs, ain’t you? Which college?”

“NYU, actually.”

“Hey!” Usnavi says excitedly. “That’s where my cousin wants to go!”

“No way? Maybe I’ll see him around, I don’t think I’m getting into my first choice anyway.”

“They’d be stupid not to take you,” Ruben says, finally drawn back into the conversation so Usnavi can relax a bit, by which he means vibrate through the rest of the meal wondering if Sonny’s got his acceptance letter yet, because obviously he’s got in and the letter’s just a formality but he still wants to be able to tell the whole world about it _officially._

Usnavi’s mamá didn’t teach him no bad manners though, so he still tries his best to be a model breakfast guest and even offers to help clean up after, trying to sound like he actually wants to. Ruben gives him an amused look and says, “I got it, you go call Sonny.”

"¿Seguro? Thankyouyou'rethebest!” Usnavi darts in to kiss Ruben on the cheek and then leaves the chaos of clean-up to make the call at the top of the stairs, for quiet and also for the relative novelty of being in an actual house with multiple floors instead of an apartment building.

There’s dozens of photographs of the kids along the walls, all up the stairs and through the hallway. It reminds him of Abuela’s place. Or his old apartment when his folks was still alive: most of the pictures on those walls he took down not long after his parents died, the sight of their faces everywhere he turned too much to handle, and somehow he never got round to putting them back up. While he waits for the call to connect he passes the time playing Find The Ruben: preschool-age Ruben with his cowlicky bowlcut hair brushed into almost-submission wearing a tiny little suit at a wedding. Ruben as a metal-mouthed teenager smiling on a beach somewhere. There’s one _extremely_ good one of an unmistakable and very round infant in a blue onesie that makes Usnavi blurt a delighted “¡gordito!” and clutch at his heart. He’s still trying to recover from it when Sonny picks up.

“If you’re calling to tell me you’re lost I ain’t know what you expect me to do about it,” Sonny says.

“Have you checked your mail?”

“The hell you talking about?”

“Ruben’s sister got her acceptance letter from NYU yesterday.”

The sentence is hardly out before he can hear Sonny’s apartment door slamming as he runs for the mailbox.

“Go go go go go!” Usnavi cheers.

“Going going going!” Sonny chants the whole way down “Alright. Here we go. Mailbox. Opening that mailbox. Gettiiiing…that mail.”

Usnavi waits patiently, for at least two entire seconds. “So?”

“There’s a letter,” Sonny says, in the same kinda voice someone might say _well there’s a subway train about to run over my head._

“Oooh my gaaa,” Usnavi squeaks. “It’s finally happening! Open it! Open it! Open—“

Sonny makes an angry parrot noise down the phone at him and says “that ain’t makin’ me less nervous, man!”

“What, why are you nervous?”

“Uh, because what if it’s a rejection? You said Ruben’s sister got hers yesterday, why’d mine be a day late if it was the same?”

“Just how mail do, no stress! I believe in you!”

“That’ll just make me feel even worse when they laugh my application out of Manhattan.”

“That ain’t gonna happen.” Usnavi makes sure he’s using his best I Am Your Wisest Cousin voice and says “look, Sonny, if you don’t get in at NYU then it wasn’t meant to be, and it’ll suck for a little while but it ain’t gonna be the end of the world. You’ll find somethin’ else just as good. But either way you ain’t gonna know till you open it, so will you _open it already por el amor de Dios --_ ”

“Okay! Okay, I’m doin' it.” There’s a moment of quiet while he opens the letter, and then just a long, heavy exhale.

Usnavi’s certainty wavers for half a second. “Sonny?”

“I got in,” he says, in such a flat voice that Usnavi almost gives him the _plenty more fish in the academic system_ speech before the actual words process.

“You got in?!”

“I got in!”

“Yeeeeeees!” Usnavi hollers. “¡Alabanza! That’s my _boy!”_

Sonny gives a victorious battle-cry and shouts “coño, Usnavi, I’m going to _college_!”

Usnavi rolls over to lie on his back on the hallway carpet, kicking his legs up in the air. “I knew it! I knew it! I knew you could do it! Holy shit, I’m taking you out to celebrate as _soon_ as I’m back, or—hm, I’m only in Philadelphia now, it wouldn’t take too long to drive back home and—“

“Don’t be a dumbass, I can wait till after California,” Sonny says. “I mean, I’m gonna be celebrating for at least two months, you ain’t gonna miss out on none of that.”

“Yeah, yeah, es cierto, I gotta go tell the whole west coast that my cousin’s a goddamn star student. Nina Rosario, watch the throne!”

“Jeez, don’t say no shit like that when you see her, she’ll take it as a challenge,” Sonny says. “And hey, don’t go telling everyone before I get a chance to, I ain’t want you stealing my spotlight.”

“Uuugh, you’re killin’ me,” Usnavi complains. “Fine, but only ‘cause you earned it. Can I at least tell Ruben and his family, since they probably heard me yelling anyway?”

“Yeah, that’s fair. Shit, I better message him later, though. He got me through all those applications, I owe him bigtime.”

“I think looking after his plants is payback enough. Fair warning: he left you a whole encyclopedia of instructions.”

Sonny groans. “Aw, jeez, I forgot about that. Will he be mad if I kill any of ‘em, do you think?”

“No, he’ll just say it’s fine but secretly be real sad about it.”

“That’s so much worse. I’ll head there now. Keep me posted on the roadtrip, can’t wait to see you lose your mind from boredom an hour in.”

“Sure thing. And Sonny…I’m so proud of you.”

“So you damn well should be,” Sonny says, and hangs up. 

Usnavi sits back up, then puts his head down on his knees and says _aaaaaa!!_ to let off some steam before he goes to break the good news to everyone downstairs. He smiles at a photograph of Ruben at his college graduation as he passes, making a firm resolution that wherever he lives next, he wants walls full of memories just like this again, and he’s saving the best spot for the picture he’s gonna get with Sonny in that cap and gown.

***

Usnavi’s okay and all but if Vanessa had to pick out two of his biggest flaws then right now it’d be one: he forgets that other people aren’t inside his head and don’t understand the weird shit he sends them without context and two: after two goddamn months he still hasn’t grasped timezones.

 **vanessa:  
**\- its 5am why are you sending me pictures of this fat baby  
\- did ruben give birth  
\- is it mine or yours

 **usnavi:  
**-we stopped at his moms on our way thru philly, there’s pictures everywhere!!!  
-im gonna fuckin cry look at his chubby little cheeks

 **vanessa:  
**\- thats hilarious hes spherical  
\- “congratulations its a beautiful baby basketball!”  
\- “i will name him ruben. now watch me dunk”

 **usnavi:** **  
** you leave him alone!!! he is precious

She scrolls back up to chuckle at the pictures one more time and then tucks her phone away under her pillow, but her morning brain has started rumbling through an incredibly slow train of thought that stops her from catching every valuable second of sleep she can squeeze in before her alarm.

Ruben and Usnavi are in Philadelphia, morning brain tells her as she flips her pillow to the cold side.

Morning brain manages, with great effort, to point out that Ruben and Usnavi aren’t usually in Philadelphia. Vanessa rolls over.

Ruben and Usnavi are in Philadelphia because they are driving here to see you, morning brain eventually concludes, with sluggish triumph. Vanessa ponders on that for a hot second then sits upright, wide awake, and when that isn’t enough she gets right up out of bed. They’re on the way, fucking _finally!_ She might not sleep till they get here. She might just stand here and laugh like the Joker till they arrive, that’s what she feels like doing, and she feels like opening the blinds and letting a bunch of ratty-ass birds fly around like she’s fuckin’ Cinderella getting ready for the day, bright and early, never too early to start getting ready because there’s so much to do before her boys come back to her.

Sitting the kitchen, showered and dressed and last night’s dishes done and still an hour and a half to kill before work, Vanessa concedes that three days in advance is maybe a _little_ early to start getting ready. She makes herself another coffee to pass the time, instant because she knows her limits, and inhales the earthy scent thinking _in three days I can have Usnavi coffee again_ and it makes her heart actually hurt _._ She needs to do something with herself. What do people even do in the morning?

Her eyes fall on the mixing bowl inverted on the drying rack and she thinks, _in three days I can watch Ruben baking at stupid times of the day again._

This is how Nina ends up stumbling in still bleary-eyed to find Vanessa humming under her breath to the radio, blinds open to the dawn sunlight and a sweet smell in the air.

“Nina!” she exclaims, cheerfully. “Good morning!”

Nina checks behind her, like she’s expecting the real Vanessa to be creeping up the hallway. “Um, what is happening? Are you dying? Am _I_ dying?”

Vanessa beams at her, unfazed, spatula dripping batter on the countertops. “I made pancakes! Grab a plate, I still got plenty left.”

“I’m…scared?” Nina says. She gets a plate anyway.

***

“You don’t need _all_ of those at once,” Ruben says as they set off from the Target with forgotten supplies replenished. He points at the four reused plastic takeout containers Usnavi dug out of the actual cooler of food Ma sent them along with and insisted ride in the front seat with him, precariously balanced on his knees. “We are going to stop at some point.”

“What if there’s a food emergency?” Usnavi says. “I need quick access snacks. Quick access lap snacks. Stacks and stacks of snacks on laps. Snapchat all my snack stacks.”

“Is this your mixtape?”

“Road triiiip!” Usnavi sings at him. “Roaad trip!”

“You’re in a very good mood for someone who’s about to be stuck sitting in one place for fifteen more hours today.”

“What’s not to be in a good mood about? It’s a wonderful day, hermoso.”

Ruben taps his fingers on the wheel and considers that. It’s sunny, it’s still early and they’re making fast progress. The signs on the overpasses that had been calling out _Philadelphia International Airport, stay on the right if you want to make the life-ruining mistake of coming here again_ at regular intervalsnow only indicate which lanes to take for Chester, Wilmington, Edgmont Avenue. They’re still in Philadelphia but not in Ruben's Philadelphia any more, the good or bad pieces, the childhood or the adulthood or the rebirth. The hospital and the house and the kitchen table and the mistakes. Breathe easier. He’ll probably never see Ma’s house again, if it sells fast enough. He’s not too broken up about that. He doesn’t miss much about growing up. He only ever misses one thing about this city.

“Is it bad that I kinda hope Paola does end up at NYU?” he asks Usnavi. “I know she’s still hoping to get into Yale, but it’d be right around the corner from us.”

“It ain’t bad to want your family nearby.” Usnavi pops the lid off one of his boxes and pokes around in there, clicking his tongue quietly against his teeth. “I can’t believe Sonny’s going to college already.” He pulls out a pastelillo and, examining it closely, says, “things are gonna be better for them than they was for us, ain’t they? Things are gonna be easier.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I think they are.”

Usnavi nods, then fumbles his pastelillo, then drops most of the boxes trying to reach down into the footwell to retrieve it. Ruben could have told him that was going to happen. Ruben’s leaving Philadelphia behind for the interstate, for long quiet stretches of midwest and highway where they can eddge past the speed limit and make it to the horizon just a little quicker than anticipated. The kind of thing people usually do when they’re in college, when they’re alive and growing and moving forward and have just learned that they don’t need anyone’s permission to do any of those things. Ruben’s on a cross-country drive with his first real friend, his boyfriend, with driving playlists and his mama’s food.

“Things are better for us now, too,” he says.

“Yeah, they are,” Usnavi says, dusting off his floor pastelillo and putting it in his mouth in one bite. He is quite possibly the most disgusting human Ruben's ever met. “Smf. Rmph trffp?”

“Road trip!” Ruben agrees, and holds a hand out for a pastelillo of his own.

***

Vanessa’s whole morning at work was slow torture, even though she was so overrun that she hasn’t sat down since eight AM, but that must be nothing compared to having to wait it out in a car. Apparently Usnavi’s been spending the drive finally learning how to use his social media properly. She plays through his Instagram story and eats the foam off her cappuccino with a spoon while she waits for her housemate Violet, who’s in her neck of the woods and suggested meeting up for late lunch. There’s a lot of smudgy pictures of trees and empty fields as taken through the window of a speeding car. There’s also a lot of videos that will probably end up in a courtroom labelled with things like Exhibit F: Yet Another Reason Why My Boyfriend Drove The Rental Car Off A Cliff.

 _only in wv 10 minutes and he already praying for ohio_ , the caption reads, as Ruben’s voice says plaintively “—we _please_ listen to _any other song?”_

“To the plaaace — nope!— I belooong!”

“You can’t do this all the way through West Virginia.”

“Watch me.”

“How would you like it if all anyone ever did in your state was sing _New York, New York_ twenty-four seven?”

The image blurs out in exuberant movement. “I — want — to _be_ a part of it! West Virginia, mountain mama, so good they named it twice!”

“They didn’t.”

“Are you mad I never sang about where you’re from? ‘Cause i can do that now. Iiiin _West_ Philadelphia, born and raised—"

Focus on Ruben’s face, the definition of unimpressed in profile. “I was _not_ born in Philadelphia.”

“Puerto Ricooo, take me hooome, to the playground where I spent most of my days—”

“Ohh, Nina was right, you _are_ in a good mood today,” Violet says, setting a paper cup down on the table. Vanessa quickly forces her mouth back to the neutral state it was before she started watching Usnavi’s Instagram and smiling all over the place like a nerd.

“I’m always in a good mood,” Vanessa says. Violet takes the plastic lid off her to-go coffee cup and does a meaningful bounce of her pierced eyebrows. Vanessa huffs. “I was just watching Usnavi’s instagram from the car. I can tell you, no fuckin’ jealousy. Yikes.”

“Not a roadtrip gal?”

“Not a _spending forty-some hours anywhere with anyone_ gal,” Vanessa corrects. “But especially not a car. And especially not with Usnavi. I love him but he oughta come with commercial breaks for sanity.”

Violet frowns, stirring a sugar packet into her drink. “But I thought you guys lived together?”

“Not really. He was staying with me the last couple weeks before I came here but only ‘cause his lease was up. It ain’t permanent.” Violet makes an mmhm noise that might be judgemental, so Vanessa feels compelled to clarify, “nothing against him, nor Ruben. I just like living alone. I dunno how you manage it with Aubrey.”

“Necessity,” Violet says. “We weren’t planning on living together at all, but her mom kicked her out after she found out about us and she couldn’t afford a place by herself, so.”

“Oh,” Vanessa says. Way to put a foot in it. “Well. That blows. I'm sorry. Hey, I ordered my panini like twenty minutes ago, maybe I should go ask where it is?”

Violet doesn’t pay any mind to the clumsy redirect, playing with her straw thoughtfully. Vanessa is apprehensive. There’s at least three different kinds of awkward to be had making this conversation a thing.

“I don’t know,” Violet says eventually. "We didn’t plan it and we drive each other fucking batshit, but I think I’d rather wake up annoyed with her every morning than wake up without her, you know?”

She sounds wistful. Eesh, make that four kinds of awkward. Other people’s love is just as weird as other people’s problems. “I…guess?” Vanessa says, then admits, “or. Not really, actually. It ain’t my scene. I’ll probably be praying for the guys to leave by the end of the week just so’s I can hear myself think for five minutes.”

Vanessa just doesn’t really go for that sharing-my-life shit. Vanessa worked hard for her sacred solitude. Vanessa thinks about the fact that she’s going to spend the next week three people squashed into a single-occupancy room, that she'll almost definitely end up sleeping on a terrible air mattress with the boys instead of making use of her own single bed where she’d be free from Usnavi’s fidgeting and Ruben’s loud mouth-breathing, and about the fact she knows Usnavi is going to unpack his bag by tipping the entire contents out everywhere so her room's a mess for the whole week, and that Ruben is going to steal her expensive shampoo even though he'll definitely have brought his own, and she thinks about the fact that for some reason this doesn’t change how much she’s looking forward to every noisy, overheated, overcrowded second of it.

“I like my own space,” she adds, a little desperately.

***

“You know what’s crazy?” Usnavi muses, gazing at the cracked grey tile lining the bathroom wall of the diner they stopped for lunch at. No response. He raises his voice. “Ruben! I said you know what’s crazy?”

“Is it the fact that you’ve known me for a year and you still think this is an appropriate setting for a conversation?” Ruben replies from the stall. He flushes and crosses to the single basin, checking they’re alone before he rolls his sleeves up.

“No.”

“Is it the entire concept of urinals?"

“No.” Usnavi zips up and joins Ruben by the basin, waiting his turn on hand-washing. “We’re what, ten minutes out from Ohio?”

“Thereabouts.”

“That’ll be the fifth state we been in just today, if we’re counting home.” They head out of the diner towards the parking lot. Usnavi waves to their waitress on the way. She calls, “come again, now!” and he answers “I will!” even though he almost certainly won’t. “I ain’t never been to no other state in my life - well, except Jersey, but that don’t count - and now I done five in one day. It’s like fuckin’ time travel.”

“If we keep on track we should hit a couple more before we call it a night,” Ruben says, handing Usnavi the keys and getting in the passenger side. “You’re up. Think you can get us to Illinois?”

“Bitch, please,” Usnavi says, taking his place in the driver’s seat. He cracks his knuckles confidently while Ruben sets the GPS back up. “I’ll get us to all the way to _Indiana.”_

“Indiana’s before Illinois.”

“Oh. Well, I’ll still get us there.” Usnavi revs the engine demonstratively, stalls, and restarts it with undeterred optimism. “I am excellent at roads.”

“Good,” Ruben says dubiously.

“In five hundred feet, turn right,” the GPS says. Usnavi very subtly makes his thumb and index fingers into an L and reverse-L shape against the wheel. Ruben, not subtly at all, tugs at his seatbelt like he’s checking it’s secure.

***

Usnavi is nailing this. Rusty as he is, it isn’t so hard to drive out here compared to the few times he tried it in the city: back home there’s a thousand lights, a thousand noises, a thousand directions things could hit you unexpectedly - or, more likely, you could hit things unexpectedly. Ain’t no jaywalkers on I-70. Ain’t no nothing on I-70.

He manages Ohio alright. It’s been so long since he drove it took him a couple hours just to feel settled in the seat, which for some reason is scooted all the way forward even though Ruben's got longer legs than Usnavi. Sometimes to add some flavor he stalls or accidentally brakes way too hard, but by the time they’re coming up on Indiana the novelty’s wearing off. There’s nothing to look at. His eyes are so bored.

Nobody never said Usnavi can’t make his own entertainment, though. “Ruben, can you change playlist? Fourth one down on iTunes. You’re gonna _love_ it.”

“Oh, Usnavi, no,” Ruben says, seeing the title. He presses play anyway but firmly says, “you are _not_ making me do a car singalong. I never know the words, anyway.”

Usnavi’s got other playlists stocked up waiting for different moods as and when they’re needed, the obscure and the melancholic and the rain and the sunrises. U&R Awesome Roadtrip Singalong Car Jamz (March 2018) is pure, unashamed cheese, sliding seamlessly through different nostalgias of ubiquitously well-know hits. Specifically cultivated for a boyfriend who doesn’t know music but has definitely had ears and used them sometime between the 1980’s to now.“It’s roadtrip tradition! Just one song? Just a lil bit? It’s what Toto would want.”

“I didn't come back from the dead for you to James Cordon me against my will. And I think the musical stuff’s better left with you and Vanessa. Y’know, people with actual talent? Voices that aren’t like being punched in the ears?”

“This ain’t about talent. It’s about being a loud dumbass with your friends. Don’t you ever _want_ to sing?”

“I do sing.” Which is true, for the barest factor of true: Ruben murmurs melodically under his breath, and can occasionally be persuaded to raise his voice a little more, but that ain’t what Usnavi’s talking about.

“Yeah but like, really go for it? Like, just ain’t give a shit top of your voice go for it?”

“That isn’t really how I work.” Ruben pauses, then admits, “maybe sometimes it looks fun.”

“Okay, so…?” Usnavi waits hopefully, but Ruben makes a face and says, “sorry,” then says nothing, subject closed.

Toto fades out. Nobody even got a chance to bless the rains. What a waste. Usnavi turns the volume up a couple notches so he can make up for it on the next song: not like Usnavi’s got no Broadway leading man voice neither, it just doesn’t bother him when his voice breaks on high notes or wavers just the wrong side of flat on the prolonged ones. Ruben stays shtum but he’s nodding his head, always just slightly out of time but rhythmic enough Usnavi knows it’s to the music. It seems like the saddest thing in the world to him, to want to jam out and not be able to.

Then, as Usnavi’s warbling “— always talkin’ bout what he wants just sits on his broke ass so—“ by himself, an almost inaudible voice beside him joins in on the _no._

Usnavi misses a beat in surprise, just manages to pick back up at “your number—“

“No.”

“I don’t wanna give you mine and—“ he points at Ruben.

“No,” Ruben sings, pulling his sleeve down over his hand then hiding his mouth behind it.

“I don’t wanna meet you nowhere—“

“No!”

“I don’t want none of your ti-iieeaaammee!” Usnavi belts, ecstatically off-key.

Ruben’s still hiding behind his sleeve, muffled laughing, but he manages to sputter out something roughly approximating _d’n wanno scrubs_. By the time the second pre-chorus rolls round he’s into it enough that he even throws in what might be a sassy hand gesture which he definitely can’t pull off. He makes weird eyebrow faces. He hits every line half a beat too early. Usnavi might never have loved him more.

“That’s the only one you’re getting,” Ruben warns him after TLC finish their thing. His cheeks are pink and he wiggles his fingers where they’re resting on his thighs. _Happy hands_ , Usnavi thinks.

“Hermoso, that was everything I ever needed,” Usnavi says.

***

If they stick to Ruben’s meticulously structured plan, keeping their stops as efficient as possible and with the occasional strategic pushing of the legal speed limit, they’ll be at Vanessa’s late on the third day instead of having to stretch to a fourth. It means that today is a particularly long slog at nine hours each in the driver’s seat, but the idea of seeing Vanessa a day earlier, they both agreed, is worth it.

Most of this plan hinged on the fact there’s two of them and neither of them ever get more than six hours sleep anyway. What Ruben hadn’t accounted for - an unforgivable oversight considering his co-pilot - was that not everyone possesses his ability to concentrate on a monotonous task indefinitely.

It’s just over five and a half hours into Usnavi driving, nothing but country roads since they passed through Anderson almost an hour ago and with the sun setting fast. Usnavi squints into the low twilight, leaning increasingly far forward towards the windshield like he’ll see the road better somehow.

“Put your beams on,” Ruben reminds him.

Usnavi hits one of the levers on the steering column. The indicator clicks and he slaps it back down. “¿Qué? What am I doing?”

“Twist it for headlights.”

Ruben also hadn’t taken into account the fact that Usnavi, while in possession of a licence and currently operating a vehicle, is not one of life’s natural drivers: His hand hovers by the lever again for about five seconds, hesitant, and then he hits it to indicator again and says “no, what?”

Ruben leans over and rotates the dial. Usnavi nods and carries on driving, carries on chatting, and Ruben watches him still frowning hard at the road even though they lit it up bright enough he should be able to see fine now.

“We’ll be in West Lafayette in about twenty minutes, ” Ruben reassures him, because that’s where they’d planned to take a break anyway.

“Hm?”

“Twenty minutes. Dinner. Coffee.”

At the diner, Ruben orders his food, and Usnavi shreds a paper napkin with great intent while their server waits with a pen poised over her notebook til Ruben prods him with his foot.

Usnavi notices the waitress and sheepishly hides his napkin-shreds under another napkin. “Sorry. I’ll have the cheeseburger. And a coffee.”

“Sure thing, hon. Cream and sugar?”

“Black,” Usnavi says, rubbing his eyes tiredly. “Two shots of espresso.”

“Long day, huh?” she says sympathetically as she writes it down. “I’ll be right out with your drinks.”

“Gimme the keys,” Ruben says to Usnavi once she leaves. “I can get us the rest of the way today.”

“What? No, man, it’s all good, I can do it. We're almost there, right? How long’s it till the motel?”

“We should get there at—“ Ruben assesses the diner: mostly empty, the only other patrons one stout, tired-looking man in a trucker hat two tables down smiling at his young daughter who’s babbling animatedly at him. The waitress had been at their table within thirty seconds of them sitting down. Reasonable to assume fast service. Fifteen minutes for food, half an hour to eat, factor in a bathroom break, resume at speed adherent to the limit because it’s nighttime, navigate parking at the motel “—eleven twenty-three.”

At Usnavi's expression, he adds, “...approximately.”

“Approximately, my ass. Well, that’s only— about three hours…” His tone changes halfway through to _oh I do_ ** _not_** _have three more hours in me_. Their waitress comes back with their drinks.

“Thanks.” Ruben takes his tea from her. “Usnavi, just let me drive, okay? You’re tired. You’re _ordering cafe sin leche_ tired, you shouldn’t be driving.”

“Okay then,” Usnavi accepts, with a relieved look. “If you’re sure.”

Ruben nods. “We probably should’ve agreed that before she brought the drinks, d'you wanna call her back?”

“Es bueno, I’ll just —nnnooope,” Usnavi dribbles his first sip of double-shot black coffee back into the cup and waves at their waitress, wiping his mouth on his shirt sleeve. “Hi! Could I get some milk, please?”

***

When Ruben’s tired, he generally stops talking, can’t get his brain to manufacture more words without applying extreme pressure. Usnavi is the opposite: he’s got his eyes closed like he’s sleeping in the passenger seat but Ruben only needs to occasionally remind him when he forgets to finish a sentence and Usnavi will go on for another uninterrupted ten minutes. Non-sequitur nonsense, meaningless noises, anecdotes that go nowhere.

“-didn’t put it by la puerta pero then I told him…” Usnavi trails off to tap his knuckles against the window. "I told him..."

It was full nighttime by the time they were done at the diner. Now they’re surrounded by uninhabited countryside, surrounded by night sky, surrounded by the rumble of a rental car. Ruben hasn’t been on roads so empty since—

“You told him what…?” he prompts, and Usnavi says, “¿Quién? Oh, right, so I told Sonny I _saw_ the whole thing and actually it wasn't even a real dog—“

Ruben runs one hand round the elliptical curve of the steering wheel. He hasn’t been on roads like this since, but he wasn’t the one driving then. He is now. Front seat behind the wheel means he’s deciding where they’re going and tonight they’re going to Illinois, and he’s deciding the soundtrack: the music turned off completely, listening without listening to Usnavi burbling like a stream the whole way there.

***

They arrive at the motel at eleven twenty-six. Approximately. The guy on the front desk grunts acknowledgement as Usnavi asks him for a double room, then hands over their keys without looking up. Ruben’s desperate enough to just get to their room he couldn’t give a shit about the customer service, but he does pause in the doorway with a surprised “oh” when he opens the door.

“Oh,” Usnavi echoes, peering around Ruben at the two twin beds. “Well. We could always push them together?”

In the time it takes Ruben to use the bathroom and come back out to get his toiletries out of his overnight bag, though, Usnavi’s sprawled out on the bed closest to the door in only his boxers, facedown and not looking inclined to start moving any furniture around.

Ruben pokes him.“Gonna brush your teeth, at least?”

Usnavi mumbles “I got…? seven…? next time?” into his pillow and doesn’t budge.

“Alright then.”

In the bathroom, Ruben brushes his teeth, washes his face, leaves the single faded motel-issue hand-towel hanging from a hook on a door to pat his face dry on the t-shirt he’s wearing instead. It’s not a dirty room, as such, but it’s definitely not a clean one. The harsh overhead light picks up on all the smudges and smears that a long life of just-passing-throughs has left imprinted deeply, the things that the hurried surface cleaning of too few staff with too much ground to cover never manages to touch. There was never enough time to do more than the minimum when he worked at the hotel in Alligator Pond. There was never enough reason to do more. There wasn’t any reason for anything.

He washes his face again, the harsh overhead light picking up on all the shadows and sadness that a hurried surface cleaning never manages to touch, then turns away from the mirror to change. It was a long drive. It was a long day. A good day. But a long one.

Back in the bedroom he plugs his phone in to charge, texts Vanessa to let her know they’re turning in for the night, back at it tomorrow.

 _not long now,_ she answers, seconds later. _sleep well. i love you._

 _i can’t wait,_ he replies. _love you too,_ and then he sits quietly on the bed furthest from the door. Motel sheets, motel dusty-musty-overlaid with lemon scented cleaner air, motel impersonal spaces, temporary places for temporary people. Last time Ruben was in a room like this, he had nothing, he had no-one.

He leaves the empty single bed to squeeze in next to Usnavi, who wakes up just enough to slide an arm over him and murmur, “oh, you’re here”, like he’s been waiting.

“So are you,” Ruben says, and turns out the lamp.


	2. Chapter 2

Usnavi wakes up with a Ruben in his bed - awesome - and a mild cramp in his everywhere. Not awesome. See, he always said that sitting still does a body no good, and after the long drive yesterday now he’s got the backache to prove it. He was looking forward to getting some air and stretching his legs, but they have to drive through a few villages to even find somewhere to eat that’s open, and walking to the entrance of what seems to be the only diner in Benson, Ruben’s got his hands tucked in his pockets, no leeway for a maybe on Usnavi holding one.

“Twin beds, huh?” he mutters to Ruben, who gives him a rueful smile.

“Apparently."

“Coulda just been he misheard?”

“Could’ve been that.”

Misheard or not, Usnavi’s only an optimist to a limit, so when they sit down at the café he sits opposite Ruben instead of beside him, hooks his feet around the bottom of his chair so his legs wont be tempted to creep out and tangle with Ruben’s under the table, and that pretty much sets the tone for breakfast.

There’s no reason other than instinct for it, or assumption, or whatever you wanna call it. Their server is perfectly friendly. Aside from everyone looking up at them just a little longer than feels normal when they came in nobody’s paid them any mind, and that might just as much be that they’re new faces than because of what kind of faces they are. And probably Usnavi’s the only one who can sense the big rainbow-colored arrow pointing him and Ruben out but either way he’s very aware that they stick out like a coupla sore thumbs in here for a multitude of reasons. That doesn’t ever happen to him in the Heights.

Ruben’s already counting out the bill with one hand while he’s still got half his bagel in the other (and its no comparison to a New York bagel, Usnavi can’t help but think). They get back to the car in record time, where they both relax a little: might be overcrowded in here, but at least they ain’t outnumbered.

Even though he drove most yesterday, Ruben takes first shift at the wheel: “there’s a _plan_ ,” he says, waving his brown leather notebook, “and the plan says I’m driving this morning, we can’t change it now.” So Usnavi stares out the passenger side window, nothing to do but sip his bottle of cherry Coke and skip indecisively through his playlists, trying to muster up the same excitement about things as yesterday but they’ve been on I-80 for a while and so far it’s very much same deal, different day.

“We’re right outside Iowa, though,” Ruben says, when Usnavi mentions that it feels like they’ve already spent six years driving through the same field in Illinois.

“Oh, sick, what’s in Iowa?”

“On our route?” Ruben makes an apologetic face. “I’ve never been to Iowa before but I think it’s mostly just… more of this.”

Usnavi’s feelings on that must be writ all over him because Ruben glances at him then laughs. “Welcome to the Midwest, we’ll be here all day.”

Usnavi laughs too then abruptly stops when he realizes oh, god, they actually _will_ be here all day. In this car. In the Midwest.

 _It can’t_ all _look the same really,_ he thinks hopefully.

And, _when are you ever gonna see this much empty space again? This much green? Make the most of it._

Ten minutes into Iowa, which is literally the exact same place as Indiana and Illinois, Usnavi is of the opinion that if he wanted to look at green all day he could stay home and stare at a bag of salad and it’d be less draining on the soul. You see some whack-ass shit on the daily living in NY, but every subway crackhead and Scientology recruitment scheme he’s ever met doesn’t come close to being unsettling like Iowa is unsettling: this landscape that had been strange and new and fascinating yesterday is starting to make him feel like he’s at the start of a horror movie: _it’s quiet. Too quiet_. Playa Rincon is always quiet too whenever he goes back there but even standing on the beach alone at five in the morning just after losing Abuela staring into the ocean never felt this endless. In DR he can feel his body and his bones and his spirit vibrating to the heartbeat of the island no matter who’s there with him. Iowa isn’t his, whole swathes of this country he was born and grew up in aren’t his at all, and it’s so empty along I-80. An oppressively large nothing that they’re rolling through on a treadmill, going a whole lot of nowhere fast.

 _Vanessa, Vanessa, Vanessa,_ he reminds himself, but even that doesn’t bring back the excitement. He tries to stretch his legs out but there’s not enough space to be satisfying and he has to fight the immediate impulse to fling himself out of the speeding car for some breathing room. It’s like waiting for the last bell at school on a Friday: the weekend is a lie, welcome to Sit Still and Shut Up, you’ll be here forever.

Welcome to the Midwest. You’re going to die in corn. _Forever_.

“Yes,” Ruben says very certainly when Usnavi asks if you can be claustrophobic and agoraphobic at the same time. “You definitely can.”

“Interesting,” Usnavi says. He downs the rest of his soda in one. His leg starts bouncing of its own accord.

***

Usnavi regrets the soda not long later, coincidentally around the same time he regrets that they left so quick after breakfast they didn’t make time for a bathroom break first.

“Hey,” he says. “Are we stopping soon?”

“Hadn’t planned to until Nebraska. About three hours.”

“Three hours?” Usnavi muses. They go over a pothole at about 90. Nooope. He unscrews the lid of his empty coke bottle and says, “you ain’t allowed to judge me for this, okay?”

“For w—“ Ruben starts, as Usnavi unzips his fly. Usnavi raises his eyebrows like _I think_ _you know what_. “No.”

“I said you ain’t allowed to judge!”

“I’m still going to! Stop taking it out right now, Usnavi I swear to _god_ _—“_

***

“I hate this,” Ruben complains, pointing at the bottle in the cupholder. “It’s distracting me from driving.”

“It’s got a lid on,” Usnavi says dismissively. “Stop being such a baby. Didn’t you deal with samples at the lab?”

“That’s for science, it’s different. We could have just stopped. At a bathroom. Like civilized beings.”

“What bathroom?”

“Or in any one of the thousand deserted fields we’ve gone past today?”

“This is saving us time. If anything you should thank me.”

“And _you_ should drink more water.” Disgust forgotten, Ruben picks up the bottle and examines it, still half-watching the road. “You’re really dehydrated. You’ll get kidney stones if you aren’t careful.”

“Oh my god,” Usnavi says, with fascinated horror. “Are you trying to diagnose me right now?”

“I’m just saying,” Ruben says, putting the bottle back down. “I’m pretty sure you don’t want kidney stones, so I’m just _saying_. Have you noticed any pain? Or blood?”

“Ruben, if I were pissing blood you can be damn sure you’da heard me screamin’ from the bathroom about it.”

“Okay, but if you do want me to take a sample to —“

“Oh my _god_ ,” Usnavi says again. “Me rindo, we’ll stop at the next creepy little village and I’ll buy a fuckin’ gallon of water to chug if it’ll just make this conversation end.”

***

“I have to pee,” Usnavi says from the passenger seat, one not-actually-creepy little village, a few hours and about a litre of water later.

“Are you serious? We only just stopped! It’ll take us a week to get to Vanessa at this rate.”

“You’re the one who told me to drink more water,” Usnavi wails. “I don’t know what you want from me!”

Ruben takes one hand off the wheel to massage his temple. “We’re twenty minutes out from Omaha, can you wait till then?”

“Sí, probably.”

“That is not as much confidence as I wanted,” Ruben says, and steps on the gas.

***

Nobody, Ruben thinks, can ever have been this excited to see Nebraska in the entire history of the state. Usnavi’s practically hanging his head out the window, gawking like they’re passing through one of the seven wonders of the world and not a generic strip mall in Omaha.

“¡Mira, Ruben!” he says. “Suck it, I-states, it’s Nebraska time now! People! Humanity! A Starbucks!”

“Holy crap,” Ruben murmurs. “Usnavi De la Vega wants a Starbucks. Iowa broke you.”

“Jesus, no, I don't _want_ one,” Usnavi says. “I’m just glad to see anything familiar at this point, ain't mean we have to go there. We are goin’ to…ooh, that McDonalds! Chaboy’s gonna destroy himself a 20-box of McNuggets, gracias.”

The parking lot of the strip mall is about half full, and coming up to the door of the McDonalds, Ruben notices it’s awfully quiet for saying it’s lunchtime. It’s also very dark. And there’s a notice from the health inspector posted on the door. “Usnavi, I don’t think this is open.”

“Of course it’s open,” Usnavi says, pulling uselessly at the handle while Ruben reads the sign.

“It says it’s closed. _Very_ closed. As in, health inspector says you’re probably gonna catch something just from touching the handle closed.”

Usnavi keeps trying with the door anyway. “But I don’t care about my health! And I still need the bathroom!"

With significantly less remorse than he would’ve had if Usnavi hadn’t just reminded him about the Coke Bottle Incident, Ruben says “Usnavi, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but I think we have to go to-”

Usnavi barges his shoulder against the door, desperately. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you _dare_ say it to me.”

***

They’re not moving yet, but Usnavi’s hands are already clenched white-knuckle round the wheel. He looks straight ahead, because he knows what he’ll see if he looks to his side and it’s too much to tolerate.

“At least there wasn’t a line,” Ruben tries to console him. “You should drink your coffee, you’ll need it.”

Usnavi shakes his head violently. “I don’t wanna. You can’t make me. I’d rather fall asleep at the wheel.”

Slowly, a plastic to-go cup rises into his vision. The straw pokes against his mouth. He presses his lips together stubbornly.

“Don’t fall asleep at the wheel, I like us being alive,” Ruben says.

Usnavi considers arguing, but all told he doesn’t actually want to kill himself and his boyfriend in a fiery impact so he reluctantly accepts the straw, taking a despondent gulp of his iced latte. It tastes like tax evasion. It tastes like the crushing of small businesses. It tastes like… _Starbucks_.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Ruben take a picture. Nobody has ever been brought lower than Usnavi has been brought right now. He gets a third of the way through his drink before he has to drive away from the site of his shame.

Almost as soon as they get out of the main stretch of town, it’s clear that Omaha was a false hope. Fields again, as far as the eye can see.

“I hate Nebraska,” Usnavi announces.

***

“We’re going very fast,” Ruben observes, hoping that the implied _so please stop doing that_ will come through.

Usnavi keeps on at ninety-five, undaunted. “We been pushing the limit the whole time we been on the interstate, what’s the problem?”

“You’re pushing it a _lot._ And it’s gonna rain soon. The roads will be wet.”

“So I’ll slow down once it does! Only thing this part of the country has been good for so far is that ain’t nobody out here which means nobody gonna pull us over, and the faster we go the faster we get to Vanessa—“

“Or the faster we end up in a ditch,” Ruben says, and only lets go his grip on his own seatbelt when he feels their speed drop to something less death-defying. “ _Thank_ you.”

Usnavi’s frowning. “I, uh, didn’t do nothing?”

“What?”

The car slows even more. Usnavi jiggles his food on the gas and says, “seriously, I’m goin’ pedal to the metal here, but it ain’t—“ and then there’s a sudden sputtering noise, a jerky almost-stop. He pulls the wheel harshly to the side and the vehicle responds in an agonizingly slow crawl, barely bringing them safely to the side of the road before the engine goes _ghchhkkk_ and then dies completely.

“Uuuuum,” Usnavi and Ruben say, the sound of two men realizing simultaneously that they have no choice but to look under the hood of a car.

***

Ruben is a genius. Ruben’s science knowledge expands far beyond his biochem specialty into a less detailed but still not insignificant understanding of several branches of physics. Ruben has been able to drive since he was eighteen. All that considered, surely whatever’s going on with all these enginey pieces should start to make sense to him at some point, provided he approaches the problem with logic and patience?

He pokes something metal. It burns his finger.

“Ow,” he says. “Well, I give up, this is where we die.”

Usnavi’s waving his phone in the air above his head. “I don’t get it. It’s been goin’ smooth all day, why’s it gonna crap out right here where I can’t get no damn internet to tell me how to fix it.”

Ruben very much wants to say _see what happens when you don’t listen to me_ but totally healthy cars don’t break down just to prove him right about speeding. So instead he says “okay, I can’t get internet either, but I’ve got enough bars to call Vanessa,” because he’s not sure what else to do and asking Vanessa is usually, if not actually helpful, at least interesting.

“Hey, you!” she says as soon as she picks up.

“Hey,” he says, melting a bit at how happy she sounds. Usnavi shouts “hi, Vanessa!” then gets in the car and tries to get it started again, which only results in a few pathetic grinding noises.

“So, how’s the roadtrip coming?” Vanessa asks. He can hear noise in the background, office murmur, distant productive-sounding raised voices. She must be at work.

“It isn’t. Our car broke.”

“Oh, damn, what happened?”

He looks under the hood again like it might have manifested new answers and repeats, “our car broke,” because that’s really all he’s got. “Can you google it for us? No internet out here.”

“Sure.” There’s a pause while she types, and then she says “hmmm,” following it up with an even longer pause.

“So…?”

“So I googled _why car not work_ and I—wait—yeah, I don’t understand anything I'm reading.” She makes a little clicky noise with her tongue. “Was it a…problem with theee….no, I got nothing. Sorry. I mean, I don’t drive, you’da been better off calling Benny. Uh, I guess do you…have gas?”

“Yes, we’ve got gas, we’re not stupid,” Ruben says impatiently. He holds the phone away from himself and mouths _do we have gas?!_ at Usnavi, who checks the fuel gauge and then, with wide eyes, slowly shakes his head. “Ah. Well. We definitely have gas, but thank you for trying, and we have to go and… look at the engine now. It’s probably the engine is broken. We’ll fix it. The engine.”

“Uh, good luck?”

“Yes, you too, thanks, bye love you bye.” He hangs up. “We don’t have gas? You didn’t keep an eye on the gauge?”

“Ruben.” Usnavi points warningly out of the window at him. “If we have to start our lives over living in this field I don’t wanna start it with a fight. I was concentrating on other stuff.” He gets out and, shielding both his eyes, looks up the road at two cars approaching in the distance. “Not like I coulda done much about it out here anyhow, is there?”

Oh. He seems annoyed. The roar of the two passing cars grows louder as it nears them; Usnavi waves both his arms in the air. They don’t slow down. He grits his teeth, visibly.

As a peace offering, Ruben says, “I probably should’ve filled up in Omaha, I didn’t think to check.”

Usnavi untenses a little. “Eh, we’ll split the blame. We’re, uh, not gonna tell Vanessa about this, right?”

“ _Fuck_ no,” Ruben says, with feeling, just as a car pulls up behind theirs. A large, middle-aged woman in a blue bandana waves at them from the driver’s seat. She says something to the giant, gentle-looking mutt of a dog riding shotgun and waits for it to lie down obediently before she gets out.

Usnavi beams, either at the rescue or the dog, and steps forward. Ruben’s all ready to let him do his usual Usnavi thing when the woman booms “hola, boys!”, hard H-sound, and Usnavi immediately stops in his tracks, then scoots ever-so-slightly behind Ruben.

“Hola,” he replies, almost inaudibly, then clams up. Doesn’t even ask to pet the dog. Ruben’s so thrown that it takes him a second to step in and greet her in his politest, most college-boy voice: “thank you so much for stopping. We’re in a bit of a predicament.”

“Don’t you worry, we’ll get you goin’ again in no time,” she says, and claps her big broad hands together. “What’s the issue, fellas?”

Ruben instinctively waits again for Usnavi to talk first. Nothing. “We’re out of gas.”

“Ain’t that some bad luck? Gonna take you a while to reach the next town on foot from here.”

“I don’t want to be any trouble, but would you be able to drive me there, if you’re going that way?” He hates the idea, honestly. But he hates the idea of sending Usnavi off into the middle of nowhere with a stranger even more so what choice is there? Not when he doesn’t even know if Usnavi’s looked up how to safely roll out of a speeding car, or where the escape handle is inside the trunk, or any of the information Ruben has ready to go in case of emergency. Mental note to teach Usnavi and Vanessa ASAP.

“I can do you one better,” she says, “I got a can of gas goin’ spare.”

“You do?! That would be amazing, thank you so much.”

“No problem, just gotta find it first.” She pops the trunk, shuffles around a bit, and while she’s searching through what sounds like an entire house worth of random crap, asks, “so where’d y'all come here from?”

“We’re from New York,” Ruben says, well aware his small talk isn’t up to scratch but not sure where to take it next. He’s not used to being the one doing the talking.

“Thought so, nobody who spends much time out in the country’s gonna go drivin’ around without a spare can or two, never know when you might get caught between gas stations.” Finally, she pulls out a worn-looking red can, with a slightly breathless “ha! There we go.” Then she adds, “your brother sure is quiet, ain’t he?”

Ruben looks at Usnavi. So does the woman, bestowing a kind smile on him and asking “no habler English?” to which Usnavi only shrugs. “Y’know, my niece married a nice young Mexican boy last year.”

“Really? That’s nice,” Ruben says. Nod and smile and move the conversation on quickly, it got him through a lot of conversations like this at college and IMH. He pulls out his wallet. “How much do you want for this?”

“No, no need for that!” she says, already heading back to her own vehicle. The dog sits up hopefully inside as she gets close. “Call it my good deed for the day. Good luck with the rest of your drive.”

“Oh, but—“

“Rubén, realmente debiaramos irnos, hemos perdido mucho tiempo.” Usnavi gives a quick, fleeting smile at the woman that, if it was from anyone else, Ruben would have described as shy. When’s Usnavi ever been shy? “Muchas gracias, señora. Adios.”

“Adios,” she replies cheerfully. AY-dee-ohs.

Usnavi gets back in the driver’s seat while Ruben refills the tank, and they resume quietly, at below the speed limit, music at a normal volume. Ruben can only half figure out what just happened.

“She meant well?” he ventures. “Definitely not the worst we could’ve got.”

“I know,” Usnavi says, but he still looks unhappy.

***

Usnavi doesn’t know why that little encounter with the woman who helped them out with gas has left a bad taste in his mouth, but he’s still thinking about it. In New York he’d take her brand of misguided but friendly over some the shit he’d get in the bodega any day of the week. But he’s not in New York, is he? That’s the problem, that’s been the problem all day. It’s different out here. Everything’s just _different_ out here.

As if to put the fuckin’ cherry on it, it starts raining, suddenly and heavily. The road’s only visible a scant few feet in front of him. Usnavi’s forced to bring them down to the speed limit, then way lower than it, and with every crawling through the downpour second it feels like going backwards. Running out of gas only set them back twenty minutes but there’s this ringing bell in his head like sleeping through the alarm that’s telling him he’s going to be late. He leans forward, hoping that if he focuses hard enough they’ll somehow be able to magically make it to Vanessa’s tonight instead of a whole nother day, because he’s starting to feel like he’s pretty done with this whole thing.

Just as he’s about to put his lights on, Ruben says, “make sure you have your headlights on, you’ve got no visibility here.”

“Yeah, I was goin' to.”

If they make it to Vanessa sooner, Usnavi also wont have to listen to Ruben backseat driving any more. Since they ran out of gas it’s basically a constant commentary. Worst part is nine times out of ten it’s shit Usnavi really wouldn’t have picked up on if Ruben hadn’t pointed it out. But he _did_ know about the lights. And he also knows that Ruben pointing things out is as distracting as it is justified, disrupting any sense of flow Usnavi might have scraped together since the last comment, the mental equivalent of starting and stopping in heavy traffic even though they’re basically the only ones on the road.

He decelerates to take the sharp left hand curve the GPS indicates is coming up. Ruben says, “oh, take this curve slowly.”

“Ruben, please just _let me drive,”_ Usnavi snaps, and immediately feels hideously guilty about it, but not for long because instead of Ruben shrinking in on himself and quietly apologising, he folds his arms and says, “well, I’m just telling you stuff you might not have noticed.”

Of course he chooses _now_ to be sure of himself, instead of a moment when Usnavi can be pleased about it. “I know you are, but it’s really distracting.”

Ruben says, “if you can spend the whole time I’m driving complaining about Iowa and bathrooms, I don’t see why I can’t talk about things that are actually helpful,” and then says “ _Jesus christ—!”_ because Usnavi very abruptly pulls onto the grass verge at the side of the road and stops. “What the _hell_ , Usnavi?!”

“I need you to—“ Usnavi gestures at the steering wheel, then in the air, then brings his hands down slowly like trying to squash down his frazzled nerves under them. “Just—don’t. Okay?”

He gets out of the car. Ruben stays inside, Usnavi can see him tapping at his phone but doesn’t look close enough to see if his face is upset or pissed or whatever, he turns to lean his back against the side of the car. He really doesn’t have space to worry about it right now.

It’s torrential out here. Usnavi can barely see through the raindrops and doesn’t try to. Now he’s not squinting through it to drive he’s glad of the rain, the smell of it rising fresh on grass and tarmac, the breeze sharp instead of the lukewarm recycled air of the car AC. Meditative: Usnavi in the static. Usnavi not thinking. Not thinking about not thinking. Rain sounds and blank tape. Stay here thoughtless till its easy to think again, just for a minute or two.

He’s soaked to the skin by the time Ruben leans over to the driver’s side and opens the window. “You gonna get back in?” he asks, looking up at Usnavi forlornly.

“One more minute.”

Ruben nods, then says, “I’ll drive for a while.”

It isn’t framed as a question and that’s fine, Usnavi won’t pretend he wants to drive yet. He needs about another hour standing in the rain, but Ruben’s clambering awkwardly over to the driver’s side so Usnavi goes to get in the passengers seat then pauses, suddenly noticing how wet his clothes are and regretting everything now he’s going to have to sit in them for uncounted hours.

“My overnight bag’s in the backseat,” Ruben says, mindreading. ”There’s a change of clothes in there.”

In the backseat, Usnavi takes off his hat, struggles out of his wet jeans and shirt, attempts to towel himself off with them before giving up and laying them over the backrest to dry. There’s a button down and a pair of jeans in Ruben’s bag, but he shuffles past them and takes the navy t-shirt and sweatpants Ruben’s been using as pajamas instead.

Once he’s dressed again, Usnavi climbs through to the front seat ungracefully, nearly knocking himself out on the roof in the process. Usually he’d laugh at himself and play up the endearingly clumsy role so that Ruben would find it cute, but in this atmosphere it’s mostly embarrassing, so he just buckles his seatbelt silently while Ruben starts the engine. If he’d found it hard to get comfortable sitting here this morning it’s definitely no better now, Ruben’s jammies sticking to Usnavi’s still damp skin, his hair dripping down his forehead. Shoulda got the sweater out too.

Ruben notices him shivering and cranks the heat, then gives him a sideways look. Usnavi nods, grateful, and Ruben takes his hand off the gearstick to pat Usnavi’s thigh once, very cautiously. Argument over, then? If it counts as an argument. Usnavi’s not mad, really, just tired, just got no brain left. Especially now he’s starting to warm up a little. He sits criss-cross on his seat and pulls Ruben’s t-shirt over his nose and mouth, breathes coconut and clean and cologne, and before long he’s dozing to the sound of wheels against the road and the static of the rain.

***

 **ruben:** **  
** \- me and usnavi had a fight earlier? i think

 **vanessa:  
**\- oh shit. everything ok?

 **ruben:  
**\- yeah just turns out being in a car for two days straight is kind of the worst  
\- we’ve stopped somewhere to take a break, i’m about to wake him up. i don’t know how long we’ll be here though, we’ll try and make up the time tonight but it depends how far we get into wyoming.

 **vanessa:  
****-** wait  
\- what are you saying

 **ruben:** **  
** \- i dont know if we’ll be here by tomorrow after all

 **vanessa:  
****-** oh.

 **ruben:  
****-** im really sorry  
\- we’re going to try but i cant exactly drive all night and its stressing him out way more than i anticipated

 **vanessa:**  
**-** no, its fine, i get it. better you get here a day late in one piece  
\- ill still be here

Vanessa closes out the text window with a lump in her throat and tucks her phone in her bag so she can go back to adjusting the manual settings on her camera. She’s headed out to Palo Alto for an assignment and was hoping to get some shots of her own in afterwards, if they finish before she loses the light.

 _It’s only an extra day_ , she tells herself. _Don’t get all stupid about it._

It’s hard not to. She sets the camera down and takes her phone back out, and reads Ruben’s message repeatedly till she gets used to it and gets over it. Only an extra day. Not a problem. She’s so neutral right now. She is a rock and an island and whatever.

“Ah, man troubles?” the woman in the seat opposite her says sympathetically.

 _“No_ ,” Vanessa says, because first of all how dare she even notice that Vanessa’s having a mood anyway, just because they’re both out here in public and Vanessa’s got a face? She ain’t give her permission to go reading it. And second because way to assume. There’s a million other things it could be, how does she know Vanessa hasn’t just been fired or lost a million dollars or been told she has five minutes to live?

Okay, so it kind of _is_ man troubles. But not the way the question implies. And it’s hardly even troubles so much as a little setback. Vanessa’s waited two months already, and it’ll mostly be overnight anyway when she isn't even conscious to know about it, so what's she gonna notice if she's not sleeping next to them tomorrow like she thought she would _oh god_ is she about to cry on a train? She is not about to cry on a train. Especially not in front of this nosy-ass cant mind her own damn business thinks she knows everything woman.

Vanessa takes a deep, calming, not at all tearful breath. Rock. Island. Et cetera. The woman reaches over to pat her hand and says “he’s not worth it, dear.”

“Agghhg!” Vanessa explodes, grabbing her camera and storming off to sit in a different section of the train.

***

Usnavi’s been asleep basically since they started moving again, so Ruben can’t be sure if a) they’ve made up or b) this plan will even cheer him up, but it’s worth a try. This was the nearest thing that wouldn’t take them too far off their route when he Googled it earlier, while Usnavi was having his moment out in the rain. He parks up outside the main office of the nature centre then gives Vanessa the situation update before shaking Usnavi awake.

“¿’stamos aquí?” Usnavi mumbles.

"I thought we could use a bit of a break.”

“Where are we?”

“You’ll see.”

They have to take take the rest of the route on foot. Ruben gets their jackets out the trunk and Usnavi puts his on wordlessly, walks a few steps behind Ruben, following his lead.

The skies are mostly grey in Grand Island but clearing: the worst of the rain is behind them and in the remnants of the earlier deluge where the ground is wet underfoot, somewhat slippy. There’s other people here and there who have braved the weather, more prepared in their brightly-coloured waterproofs and their walking boots than Ruben and Usnavi in their sneakers. Ruben grabs Usnavi’s arm at one point to keep himself upright, and Usnavi catches his fingers when he goes to let go, linking their hands together. He still looks sleepy, a little confused. It’s not particularly difficult terrain aside from the occasional almost-fall, though, and they make it up to the viewing platform unscathed.

“So you’re bein’ very mysterious about this weird shack in the middle of nowhere you bought me to,” Usnavi says.

Ruben points out of the open side of the structure, overlooking where the water is finally in sight, and says, “look.”

“At wh—oh my god,” Usnavi says. He leans out through the gap to look closer, mouth a little open. “What are they?”

“Sandhill cranes. It’s one of the biggest annual migration events in the country. Every March, we came at the perfect time.”

“We sure did,” Usnavi says, staring at the crowded sky in awe. The slivers of sunlight through the thick clouds are obscured, by hundreds of cranes in silhouette coming to their last stop on a long journey. The ones who already made it wait below, picking through the shallows of the Platte River on their thin legs.

There’s four other people up here, as one group, but they’ve tucked themselves into the opposite corner and only have eyes for the view, so to hell with it: Ruben wraps his arms around Usnavi (who definitely isn’t dressed warm enough for the weather, still in Rubens pajamas under his jacket) and murmurs to him about migration patterns, lifespans and wingspans and nesting habits, and then they just watch in silence.

“I’ll buy you a plane ticket home,” he says, after a while.

Usnavi leans his head back against Ruben’s shoulder to frown at him.

“We’re only doing this roadtrip because I hate planes,” Ruben says. “But that doesn’t mean you have to be stuck somewhere that you hate either, that isn’t fair. And I can afford it. You can fly back, it’ll only be about six hours that way, and if I start driving home a day early I’ll still make it in time. I left a couple of days before I have to go back to work.”

Those couple of days were supposed to be resting time, recovery of routine after throwing it out of kilter for the week, but he’s gone to work in worse states than exhausted before.

Usnavi’s eyebrows crinkle up. He looks impossibly touched, then kisses Ruben’s knuckles and says, “nah.”

“…Nah?”

“Yeah, nah. I hate being stuck in a car so long, but I don’t hate the roadtrip. This is what they’re for! You have some good times, you have some bad times, you…I dunno, learn a life lesson or grow closer as friends, I think? But it's _all_ the good part when you remember it later, ‘cause you do it with someone you wanna be with. We’re making a memory, hermoso. And ain’t no way Vanessa’s letting you leave early, are you kidding?”

Ruben loves him so much he can't even look directly at him right now. In the other corner, the other people in the viewing platform are pointing out their window, talking quietly amongst themselves. One of them writing is in a notebook, another one pulling a thermos out of a large bag. They look ready to stay posted up here a while. “Still. Maybe i should’ve planned in more things like this. I feel like I wasted our first road trip hurrying so much. Didn’t even take you to see the Grand Canyon or the world’s biggest ball of twine.”

Leaning back against Ruben’s chest, Usnavi says, in a loving, tender voice, “Ruben, mi corazón, if it’s the world’s biggest balls you’re lookin' for—“

“Sssh! Usnavi!”

Usnavi grins at him. “Don’t worry yourself about it. Wouldn’t be right us doin’ all the tourist junk without Vanessa, anyway. And who wants to sit around staring at balls when we could be on our way to her?

“We’re going to be late, you know.”

“Inaceptable. We’ll be on time.”

“There’s only so many hours in a day.”

Usnavi squeezes Rubens arms around himself one more time then wiggles free. “Then I guess we best get burnin’ the miles again. I’ll drive this time.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I feel better now. No more backseat driving though, okay?”

“Okay,” Ruben agrees, and with one last look out over the river, they leave the sandhill cranes to make their descent and make their own back down the hill to where they left the car.

***

“Hold the fuckin’ phone, is that a hill?” Usnavi asks, pointing. It’s actually barely more than a outcropping of rock, but until now the most interesting thing they’ve seen since they left Grand Island is an overpass that was a slightly different colour than all the other overpasses, about an hour ago. Rocks are more than welcome here.

“We’re out of the midwest?” he asks.

Ruben confirms, “we’re in Wyoming.”

Oh, thank _god._ Admittedly Wyoming’s not much to look at for the first while, but the one little rocky ridge turns into several turns all of a sudden into hills rising and falling along the roadside and mountains ridged along the horizon, the blue sky scattered with fluffy clouds gone faintly gold at the edges from late afternoon sun. Now _this_ is what Usnavi imagined when he’d been thinking about road trips.

“One-two-three, Rubén and U-sna-vi,” he sings. “Came to rock it on to the tip-top, best alliance in hip-hop, Y-O _—_ ming! Wyoming, god bless you, I ain’t know what your deal is but you sure ain’t fuckin’ Nebraska! And Rubén make the beat drop, Y-O!”

He points at Ruben, who does a bemused jazz hands and says, “I don’t know how to do that?”

It’s perfect. They stop at shabby little roadside diner along the way and Ruben tries to take the keys back but Usnavi’s found the flow he was missing earlier, the re-excitement he was looking for. He cranks the window to let in air that tastes like the hours just before twilight, keeps on at an easy, speedy pace till the sun’s setting low in the sky and Ruben, in the passenger seat, nearly headbutts the window as his chin slips off his hand when he nods off. He does it a second time half a minute later.

Usnavi laughs, turns the music down and keeps going after Ruben drifts off in the warmth of a golden-hour sunbeam, keeps going after sunset and after dark until the GPS brings them to a motel where Usnavi stops and steps outside to stare into the sky. Amazing how different it can be in the space of a day, of a few hours. The grey rain haze, the silhouettes of the cranes, and now here, above this motel in the middle of nowhere, a sheet of silver-scattered black like Usnavi’s never seen. Not even in the blackout. Not even in Playa Rincón.

“Oh, _damn_ , you oughta see this, Abuela,” he whispers to the air, sitting cross-legged on the hood and still gazing upward. “Is this what it looked like in La Vibora? No wonder you talked about it so much.”

He sits on the hood for as long as he can, tries to pick out ones she told him about, stargazing city boy whose only heard about a view like this from second hand: he thinks Polaris is supposed to be the brightest but they all look bright to him. Cassiopeia could be anywhere. It doesn’t matter really, it’s better to see them all together anyway, an eternal expanse of shimmering pinpoints.

It’s hard to tear himself away. Can’t stay here looking up forever, though, not when there’s looking forward to do: there’s still some hours left in the night and too far left to go. This motel is a few hours closer than the one they’d originally planned to stay at: Ruben had looked it up and programmed it into the GPS at the diner, still certain that they’ll have to wait until day four to make it to California, that neither of them had the energy to make it too far tonight. Fuck that noise. Usnavi’s wide wide awake. He’s going to see his girl tomorrow. Try and stop him.

The sound of the door closing when he gets back in is loud enough that Ruben jerks away from it, instantly scrambling for the handle of his own door, hand slamming hard against the the window like he’s trying to smash the glass out.

Usnavi holds his hands up, keeps his voice low and calm and comforting, “heyheyhey, estás a salvo, solo soy yo. It’s 2018, it’s Usnavi, you’re here, you’re good.”

Ruben presses his back against the door like he’s trying to make as much distance between them as possible, breathing hard through his nose. Through still half-closed eyes he looks at Usnavi, then looks out through the front window. “Where are we?”

“Still in Wyoming. Do you want to get out for a while, take a breather?”

“It’s dark,” Ruben says. He sounds like a little kid. _It’s dark. I’m scared._

“I know. But you’re safe. And look at all the stars, querido.”

Ruben gazes out the front for a while, without seeming to see anything. Usnavi’s not sure he’s really awake. “Wyoming?” he checks, and at Usnavi’s “uh-huh” he nods and breathes out, then leans his head against the window and closes his eyes again.

Usnavi watches him till he’s sure he’s resting easy, programs in the address for the next motel and, because it’s a long way to go with nobody to talk to, he calls up Vanessa.

***

“Beep beep beep, Usnavi in the driver's seat,” Usnavi chirps down the phone.

“Beep beep beep, Usnavi should probably be looking at the road,” Vanessa says, through the last mouthful of her toast because they’re long past polite manners with each other by now.

“I ain’t started back up yet. Our boy's sleeping, you wanna keep me company? I’ll put you on speakerphone.”

“You gonna be able to concentrate if I’m here?

“Yeah, I think better when my mouth's moving. Just let me get out of this parking lot first though.” She can hear the engine start up and makes herself comfortable clearing her laptop and her empty plate off her bed while she waits, until he gets back to the call with a “so guess who’s gonna make it to you by tomorrow?

Her whole soul lights up. “You are?! But Ruben said you're gonna be late?"

“Ruben ain’t know everything. I’m making up some distance now.”

Vanessa jiggles her foot up and down, bites down on her excitement to ask “did you two make up okay? Gonna be a shitty week if you’re putting a line of tape down the middle of my room and refusing to talk to each other.”

“Yeah, it wasn’t really a fight. Just a long day." He pauses. “I think i’m kinda homesick? Silly, ain’t it, when I only been left a day? But roadtrips ain't what I thought they'd be.” He sighs. “Or, no, it’s exactly what I thought it’d be, but it _feels_ different than how I thought now I'm doin' it. Y’know, this country’s so much bigger than I knew? World’s so much bigger than I knew. And so much stuff I ain't even thought about seeing in it. There’s so many stars. Did you see my video of the cranes?”

He’s so sweet when he gets all deep and bounces around his thoughts in that soft, contemplative way. It makes her want to crawl into the phone and curl up inside his voice. “I did. It looked pretty awesome.”

“Ruben says he wishes we’d made more time for that kinda thing. We should do this for real one day, all three of us in the car together, when you’re not a phone.”

Vanessa’s eyebrows jump a little: she’s so used to Usnavi being a homebody the idea of travelling with him hadn’t ever really occurred to her. “Where would we go?”

“Where do you wanna go?”

 _With you? Everywhere,_ she thinks. “You know I never actually been to Puerto Rico? I got a buncha cousins over there I never even met.”

“There we are, then. We’ll take a boat out so Ruben don’t have to worry about planes, he can show us round Vega Alta and tell us all his cute baby stories about when he lived there and we can drive around, see the sights, hit up the García family reunion. And then I’ll take you both over to my island and show you how we live it Dominican-style.”

“Two islands? That’s a long-ass time in a car together,” Vanessa teases. “How we gonna stop from driving each other crazy?”

“Oh, we won’t,” Usnavi says cheerfully. "But that’s the fun of it, right?"

“Okay then,” she says. “And I’m holding you to this, so no backing out.”

“No backing out,” he agrees. “We’ll take you everywhere you wanna go.”

***

The road under them is the sound of the road in the middle of empty Jamaica spaces and the road under them is the sound of vibrations in Ruben’s head leaning against the window of a bus from Philadelphia to New York and the road under them is the sound of Wyoming, is the sound of gravel outside a motel crunching in a haphazard parallel-park and the engine turns off and Usnavi says, “time to get up! We made it!”

Ruben scrunches his nose and squints at him. It’s 2018. Wyoming. Usnavi. He gets that far and then his brain says _ok but, sleep? Sleep again? Why awake?_ “Made it?”

“To the motel. The OG motel, I made up the time, we’ll still get to Vanessa’s by tomorrow night after all!”

 _Vanessa tomorrow_ is about all that filters through. Ruben smiles and says, “I like Vanessa.”

“Boy, you really ain’t with it, are you?” Usnavi says. “C’mon, sleepyhead.”

He comes round to Ruben’s side to open the door for him. Ruben forces himself to stand, half-wondering if he couldn’t just stay in the car all night because it’s so much closer, but as soon as he gets out he forgets his reluctance, pointing up at the sky with a gasp.

“Usnavi, look!” he says, grabbing Usnavi's shoulder. “Look at the stars.”

Usnavi exhales a sigh of a laugh. “I know, querido. Ain’t they beautiful?"


	3. Chapter 3

Usnavi must've told Ruben a thousand times that if he ever needs to wake him up then he can pretty much do anything up to and including pouring water on his head, but Ruben only ever goes for a quiet whisper of “hora de despertar, Usnavi”, almost soft enough that Usnavi could turn over and go back to sleep pretending he didn’t hear it, except he can also smell coffee and _that_ he definitely can’t ignore.

“Mmf. ‘m late for work?” He pushes himself up on his elbows, looking around and trying to piece together where he is.

“No, querido,” Ruben says, laughing. “But we need to go see Vanessa.”

“Oh, wepa,” Usnavi yawns, locating his phone and pressing the home button to check the time. “It’s four-thirty? I wanna get there ASAP too but damn, dude.”

“Only in Mountain - here, sorry it’s only instant, that’s all we have —“ Ruben hands him a mug. “It’s six-thirty Eastern, so really it isn’t any earlier than we usually get up, and if we leave in the next half-hour or so we’ll get to Vanessa’s place around eight-thirty Pacific, which is only eleven-thirty Eastern so we hopefully won’t be too tired—“

Usnavi scrunches his eyes up hoping that if he blinks hard enough he might be able to conceptualize timezones, but it’s a no-go this early in the morning so he just rolls out his achey shoulders and listens to Ruben thinking out loud and tries not to doze off again. Yesterday was a very long day, and they got the double room they asked for this time, and it’s still dark out. He leans against Ruben’s shoulder.

“Tired?” Ruben asks. “We’re only a couple hours out from Utah so you can sleep in the car till Salt Lake City if you want and then we’ll get real breakfast, I’ve got protein bars if you need something before then.”

Ruben always has protein bars. He’s so prepared for everything. Usnavi pokes his foot around under the quilt til he finds Ruben’s to press against and says “can we buy Vanessa a bunch of ugly tourist crap from Salt Lake City?”

“I think it would be irresponsible of us _not_ to,” Ruben says.

***

Ruben’s driving a straight line towards the mountains, resting on the Utah horizon in a faded lavender colour against the bright blue sky. To either side of the road the salt flats look like snow defiantly settled in the warmth of the day.

“Ain’t it crazy,” Usnavi says, chin resting on his hand while he gazes out the window, “how you can live in a country your whole damn life and you think you know it then in like two days of driving you realize how much of it there really is? I mean, look at this shit, I ain’t never seen nothin’ like it.”

“Not technically true,” Ruben says. “On this scale, yes, but a salt flat is just the bed of an ancient saltwater lake that’s evaporated to leave behind mineral deposits. So out there you’ve got a bit of magnesium, a bit of potassium, and you know what makes up the majority of it?”

“¿Què?”

“Sodium chloride, NaCl, otherwise known as good old fashioned table salt. Miles and miles of it. So in a way you could say see a tiny part of this every time you eat fries. Isn’t that _amazing_? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I just like it when you tell me stuff,” Usnavi says, smiling even wider. “So does that mean if the Hudson dried up would there be salt flats in Manhattan?

“Maybe? I don’t know much more how it works, to be honest. Is the Hudson saltwater?”

“Iuno, never drank none of it.” Usnavi starts digging around in the plastic bag at his feet, pulling out the t-shirt they got for Vanessa in Salt Lake City and holding it up against himself. “D’you think she’ll like it?”

The t-shirt is a rarity: an item of clothing so badly designed that it even managed to elicit a _yikes_ from both Ruben and Usnavi, two people who will be the first to admit neither of them are what anyone would call blessed with a sense of aesthetic. It’s an aggressive shade of magenta, and announces to the world in green lettering that You Can Take The GIRL out of UTAH but she’ll Always Be A UTAH GIRL!Ruben can perfectly picture Vanessa’s face when they hand it over, the _why are you doing this to me_ look that he lives for.

“She’ll love it,” he says. “There’s so many different fonts on it!”

***

“You want a omelet, Vanessa?” Aubrey offers.

“Fuck eggs,” Vanessa declines, putting some bread in the toaster instead. “Thanks, though.”

Aubrey takes her own plate and sits down at the table with it. “Your boyfriends are arriving today, right? Are you excited?”

“Yep.” Obviously. Why wouldn’t she be excited? She’s only been waiting two goddamn months for this. There’s some things that really ain’t the same when it’s just Vanessa and a laptop. Not just the fucking, although that too (good _god_ that too), but generally the being around each other. Cuddling on the couch, the overlapping morning routines with one of them brushing their teeth while another one showers, all that gross love stuff. She can’t wait.

Although...how well that will translate to a place where there’s three other people living with them too is up for question, come to think of it. Is Vanessa gonna feel weird about cuddling on the couch when Nina might walk in any minute? Is Usnavi gonna —no, okay, Usnavi’s not gonna be any different, he has no reservations about anything, but what about Ruben? Will Vanessa even get to see the things she misses about him: relaxed shoulders in loose t-shirts, laughing, letting his guard down? Those are only for her and Usnavi to see, usually. Her eyes wander to the knife Aubrey was using to slice up a pepper. What if something sets him off and she doesn’t know what helps any more? Maybe him and Usnavi have developed a whole new, more effective system in her absence. Maybe they’ve developed a whole new relationship.

She nearly jumps out of her skin when her toast pops up, quietly cussing it out for interrupting.

“If you don’t mind me saying, you don’t _seem_ very excited,” Aubrey observes.

“I am,” Vanessa says. “I was just…thinking about Ruben. I hope he’ll be alright.”

“Oh. He’s the one with the PTSD?”

“Yeah.” Vanessa feels pretty bad about the fact that Aubrey and Violet know. It was unavoidable: they’d both been in the apartment with her on the day of the Jamaica anniversary, and Vanessa had been emotionally compromised enough to let a few details slip later that evening after finally hanging up on the exhausting, day-long Facetime call. She hasn’t told Ruben. He’s bad enough about meeting new people as it is.

“I’m sure he’ll be fine,” Aubrey says. “You’ll have fun! Don’t be nervous.”

“I ain’t nervous!” Vanessa says, buttering her toast aggressively like it’s personally offended her. Why would she be _nervous_? It’s only a day she’s been waiting two whole months for. No pressure or anything.

***

Most of the places they’ve driven so far through shifted landscape slowly, the fading out of population from New York through Pennsylvania, the fading in of hills from Nebraska to Wyoming. Nevada, though, makes itself known from the start, dustier and drier almost instantly as Usnavi drives them through state lines. Even passing through small towns it feels quiet in the air, out here in the transition from Route 93 into Route 50.

“Supposedly this is the looooneliest road in America,” Ruben informs Usnavi, wiggling his fingers spookily.

“Don’t seem that all that lonely,” Usnavi says, indicating at the buildings outside the window. “Look, they got a gas station, and a Sportsworld, and that pizza place says it’s a fun time for the whole family. The _whole_ family, Ruben!”

“Well, probably it gets lonely later,” Ruben says, and sure enough outside of town they’re the only ones for miles, car winding through grey and orange hills on cracked roads paved over in patchwork, filled and refilled potholes interrupting the faded paint demarcating the center boundary. Ruben watches it pass, counts all the little green tufts of something too stubborn to be grass sprouting at the edge of the road meditatively, until Usnavi says “you know when you’re driving for ages and you suddenly just like, wake up and wonder how you even got where you are?”

“Um, yes, but you probably _shouldn’t_. Time to switch seats?”

“Puedo continuar,” Usnavi says determinedly. “I said I’d drive til Reno.”

“Quick break, then?” Ruben suggests. “I could do with stretching my legs anyway.”

“Sure.” Usnavi gets them onto a long, straight stretch and pulls up to the roadside. Climbing out the car he stretches his arms above his head and his face upwards to the sky. “Feels like summertime,” he says contentedly, then looks over at Ruben. “Does it still bother you? The weather?”

“I don’t know,” Ruben says. He hasn’t had time to think about it, really. Nevada’s a big thermometer jump up from what New York would be, but desert or not it’s still only springtime. “I’m fine with this. It’s just warm enough.”

He doesn’t know if it will bother him at all this time. Things change, after all. There’s every chance it’ll remind him of Jamaica again in some other situation, when he isn’t on a road lonely enough that he can wear a t-shirt without overthinking it, but right now he’s only thinking about _last_ summer. Light streaming in around the stickers on the bodega window while Vanessa fans herself with a magazine and shoots a stunning smile over her shoulder at him. Holding hands with Usnavi in the privacy of an early morning on a birthday that for a while Ruben didn’t think he’d see, never mind celebrate in the best way possible.

Things change a _lot._ Maybe he can get on board with summer when it reminds him of falling in love. Maybe he can get on board with it when it means that whatever winter does to Usnavi is faded to the point of imperceptible in the face of Usnavi shrugging off his button-down and laying on the hood of the car with it spread under him like a blanket saying “hey, I wonder if I’ll actually go outside enough to catch a tan this year”, whole and happy and lovely in the March sunlight.

Ruben kisses him, because how could he do anything else? Stands like a bridge over where Usnavi’s reclined, hood of the car hot under his palms resting on it. Usnavi’s mouth hot under his own. Heat between them, crackling, another thing Ruben never thought he’d be able to enjoy again till he met them. The undershirt Usnavi’s wearing is faintly see-through, the transparency of cheap white material. He runs his hand gently over Usnavi’s chest and wonders how he ever gets anything productive done when he could just do this all day. He could _very_ easily do this all day.

“Yo, you’re gonna give me tanlines,” Usnavi murmurs when they come up for air, scratching his fingers at the nape of Ruben’s neck. It burns Ruben through with enough warmth that he’s reckless enough to give into the impulse just sparked in his mind.

“Let’s get back in the car,” he says.

“We leaving already?”

“Not leaving,” Ruben says, pushes his hips up against Usnavi’s, pressing him down into the hood. “Getting back in the car.”

“Oh!” Usnavi says, surprise turning fast into a wicked grin. “Well, damn, Dr. Marcado, didn’t know you’d be into that kinda thing.”

Ruben just smiles, tugging Usnavi’s hand to get him to stand up. There are a lot of things Usnavi doesn’t know about him still. They know about Ruben’s college-age adventures, to a degree - some things are a learned skill, after all - but there’s a few details he’s held back on: this isn’t the first time Ruben’s had a riskily public hookup. He already knows it will probably be the best.

Is it Usnavi’s first time doing something like this? In theory Usnavi’s a bit of an exhibitionist, but Ruben doesn’t know to what extent he’d ever actually act on the fantasy. Back in the car with Usnavi already enthusiastically responding to every touch, Ruben thinks about Vanessa and Usnavi in the club together. He’d be willing to bet on their dancing getting at least this side of dirty sometimes, Vanessa with the perfume she saves for a big night out and Usnavi in the one pair of pants he owns that fit him, a little private corner of the dancefloor where she’ll kiss him like Ruben’s kissing him now, where she’ll work one hand under his shirt and with the other palm him over the front of his jeans, like Ruben’s doing now.

“Fuck.” Usnavi breaks away, panting. “Are we really doin’ this?”

“Yes,” Ruben says, flicks the button of Usnavi’s fly open, tugs his jeans down just enough to pull him out and start stroking him to hardness. He ducks his head and says “watch out for cars.”

“Okay,” Usnavi says, sounding dazed.

Not the first time Ruben’s done something like this, just him and his mouth and a cute guy and the chance of being caught. At the same time, he’s never done anything _exactly_ like it: none of the guys he used to hook up with would ever look at him as tenderly as Usnavi is now, cheek leaning against his one arm curled around the headrest and his other hand gently toying with strands of Ruben’s hair while Ruben takes him in his mouth. None of the other guys knew his real name for them to sigh it out softly: Ruben works his tongue and Usnavi gasps, mutters “te amo, Ruben, goddammit I love you _.”_

A few minutes later, in a very different voice, he says “Ruben, car!”

Ruben sits up quickly and pretends to look for something in the glovebox, heart pounding. Usnavi throws his button-down over his lap to cover himself. The car speeds past them, disappearing fast into the horizon.

“Close one,” Ruben says.

“We good?”

“Not yet, there’s another one coming up behind it.”

Usnavi groans, bending almost double over the wheel, white-knuckle gripping it. As soon as the second car disappears his hand lands gentle but desperate on the back of Ruben’s head. It’s something clicking into place, it’s that old familiar thrill of being taken, submissiveness Ruben’s favorite way of being in control: when he’s the one on his knees he’s the one doing all the work, bringing all the pleasure, he’s _wanted_. It’s that still-new familiar thrill of knowing that being wanted isn’t just because he’s pretty good at sucking dick or doing science.

He pulls Usnavi’s jeans down further, goes faster, in part a renewed _we need to finish before anyone sees us_ , but mostly just to make Usnavi moan and know that the sound’s carrying out into the still Nevada air for anyone to hear, if anyone were there, for the desert to know that this is Ruben’s, and that Usnavi is Ruben’s too. Usnavi plants one foot on the dash and lets his head fall back, definitely not paying attention any more to if anyone might be coming their way. His hand grabs at the steering wheel and then clutches at the frame of the window like he’s about to try and pull himself out of it. Ruben gives, and lets himself be taken, and is rewarded quickly by a faintly burning bitterness hitting the back of his throat. He pulls off, discreetly wiping his mouth, and feels like he’s earned the right to a tiny smug smirk at Usnavi’s wide eyes and blown pupils and glowing cheeks.

“Oh, I see you giving that look,” Usnavi huffs, out of breath. “Two can play your game.”

He sits up properly again, hands moving to Ruben’s belt but Ruben catches them and says, “no, not me.” He might've been daring enough to go down on Usnavi in the middle of the interstate but only because he did it with all his own clothes on, the other way round is another matter. It defeats the point if he’s allowed to get off, anyway. “I’ll wait til Vanessa.”

“Just a lil treat for me then? Damn, you’re good to me.” Usnavi leans towards Ruben but freezes as a car suddenly roars past where they’re parked, unnoticed until it was right next them. “…Do you think they could tell my dick’s out?”

“We should probably leave now.”

“Yeah.”

*** 

It’s only the day she’s been waiting for basically since she first got on the plane, but to hell with what Aubrey said, Vanessa ain’t nervous. She’s _prepared_. She’s moved her room around so that when the boys bring the airbed there’s already space for it. After work yesterday she got her eyebrows threaded and her everything else waxed, took plenty of time in the evening to wash and deep-condition her hair, trimming off her split ends and drying it properly so that it’s at its most impressively smooth and shiny. Brand-new box of condoms in her drawer alongside her just-refilled birth control pills because boy does she have _plans_ for this week. Laid out an outfit that strikes the perfect balance between _oh I forgot you were coming else I woulda changed out of this old thing_ and _hi it’s your girlfriend who is hot, remember me?_

That’s all bases covered. All that’s left to do now she’s finished work for the day is come home, eat something, take a quick shower, and then just…wait.

Standing at the station for her train back to Los Gatos, she texts the boys _where you at now?_ Ruben replies immediately: _nearly in reno! about to make our last driver switch of the journey, aaaaaa!!!_ ” and follows it up with a selfie, his default “I don’t know what face to make in photos so I’m just going to make my eyes unnaturally big” look. Usnavi’s flashing a peace sign from the driver’s seat. Her heart and stomach both attempt to run away in opposite directions.

On the other hand, Reno’s still a ways away. Instead of going straight back to the apartment from her train, Vanessa detours out to Whole Foods for the coffee beans Ruben likes and Walmart for the cereal Usnavi likes, and then spends a full hour and way too much money in a little lingerie boutique for herself. There’s very few problems in life that, if not _solved_ , can’t at least be improved by a new matching bra and panty set, in Vanessa’s opinion.

At home after her shower, she tries her new underwear on in front of the mirror, turning to the side to check her silhouette. If this week is her one chance to remind the boys of why they’re a trio not a twosome before they spend two more months apart then she thinks she’s built a pretty compelling argument here. She readjusts the cups, leans forward while pressing her arms just _slightly_ in front of her to check the bra meets her standards for “oh me? Nothing, just casually bending, you know how it is” cleavage amplification. Perfect. Make that _two_ pretty compelling arguments, and not ones that either Ruben or Usnavi can usually resist.

 _Now_ all that’s left to do is wait. Easy. No problem at all. She isn’t nervous.

***

Usnavi’s got his feet on the dash and is making terrible noises with the straw of his juicebox. He’s lucky Ruben’s in too much of a good mood to call him out on it.

_Scchhhlp. Skkrllrpp. Shllrr—_

“I think you’ve got all you can out of that one, querido,” Ruben says. Alright _, nearly_ too much of a good mood. “Coming up to California.”

“Shit, really? We’re almost there?”

“Any minute now.”

“Ayy-iiii!” Usnavi hoots loudly. “Today today today! We’re seeing her today, and she’s gonna be gorgeous and we’re gonna look like a couple of roadtrip gremlins and it’s gonna be fuckin’ _magical. I_ s there a way to run towards someone in slo-mo? It feels like it should be a slow-mo moment. A slowment?”

“Yes, it’s called walking.”

“No, like running fast but being in slow motion.”

“Probably not,” Ruben says, “try it,” which he instantly regrets because then Usnavi starts waving his arms around really slowly and it’s actually incredibly annoying, until the car slows as they pull into the short queue for the agricultural checkpoint at the California border, at which point Usnavi brings his arms down and scrunches his eyebrows.

“Ah, ¿qué es eso?” he asks, apprehensively chewing his straw.

“It’s just to make sure nobody’s going to introduce any invasive species or pests. You didn’t bring any fruit with you, did you?”

“Have I ever brought fruit anywhere?”

“Of course, forgot who I was talking to. Don’t worry about it, they probably won’t even bother to check the car.”

That said, the second the man in the booth makes eye contact with him, Ruben too is overcome by the sudden anxiety of being faced with someone in an official uniform asking questions that he’s irrationally worried he might answer wrong. What if he’s unintentionally smuggling a crateful of contaminated apples that he totally forgot about? Or if he accidentally packed all his succulents and they’re going to destroy the entire California ecosystem? What if none of those things but they search and detain them anyway?

“Good afternoon, sir, do you have any produce or wildlife in your vehicle that you need to declare?” the man asks.

“Nnnn…o?” Ruben says. The man raises his eyebrows at the hesitation. “Sorry. No, just us, definitely no agriculture.”

Usnavi pipes up with, “I have a juicebox, is that okay?”

“That’s fine, sir,” the man says, cracking a reluctant smile. “You can go right on through. Welcome to California.”

Ruben thanks him and once they’re a safe distance away back at highway speeds he says, “I assume you did that just to make me shit myself but maybe we refrain from potentially antagonizing authorities in future.”

“Says the one who was acting like we had a car full of heroin we didn’t want him to sniff out,” Usnavi says, unbothered, then rolls his window all the way down and sticks his head out to sing “Californiaaa!”

Ruben grabs him by the back of the shirt to pull him back into the car. The last thing this trip needs is a decapitation in the final stretch. “What are you doing?”

Usnavi gives him a wild grin. “C’mon, Ruben, we’re _here!”_ He wriggles free. “Californiaaa, here we _aaa-aaare_! Home of oranges and sunshine and _Vanessa_! No pare sigue sigue, Vanessa, my girl my angel my VA-NESS-A-YAA-AAA!”

Ruben can’t help giggling: Usnavi is, as always, infectious in his exuberance and holy shit, they really are here, _finally_ here. A few hours left. His heart jumps happily and he checks there’s nobody else driving near them before rolling down his own window and hollering “Vanessaaa!” to the interstate.

“Yeees!” Usnavi bellows next to him, and it’s a good job the road is clear and straight from here to horizon because both of them are laughing and shouting too hard to see.

“Hey,” Ruben says, when they calm down. “You, uh, do know that oranges and sunshine are _Florida’s_ thing, right? Not California?”

“Hm? What’s that now?”

“Never mind.”

***

“You sure you’re done?” Nina says. “I think there’s still a single speck of dust behind the TV you didn’t get.”

“Ha ha, you could lift a fuckin’ finger instead of just sitting there doin’ commentary. Ruben said they’re gonna be here in a couple hours.” Vanessa lifts Nina’s drink to put a coaster under it. “I ain’t your maid, why am I cleaning your mess?”

“Okay first of all this is _my_ house,” says Nina, offended. “Second, this isn’t mess, this is me actually sitting here, unless you’re trying to say _I’m_ the mess.”

“I mean…”

“And third, I’ve met Usnavi. Do you think he’s going to care about a mug not being on a coaster?”

“Well, Ruben—”

“Is _Ruben_ going to care about a mug not being on the coaster?”  
  
Vanessa’s seen the state of Ruben’s desk when he’s deep in research mode but she isn’t willing to let this one go. “…I meeean?”

Nina folds her arms in a triumphant way. “That’s what I thought.”

“I just want—“ she makes a frustrated gesture. “I’m trying to—I don’t know! Shut up! I just want it nice for them!”

Nina leans forward with her hands steepled thoughtfully in front of her face and says, “Vanessa, are you having a breakdown?”

“No! A little bit!” She sits down heavily. This isn’t the reaction she thought she’d have to finally being in the same state as them but since they called her from the diner she hasn’t been able to sit still. “What if it’s all awkward? What if they’ve changed and they’re so used to it being just them and they’re just like, ready to fuckin’ get married or whatever?”

“Usnavi wouldn’t dare get married without me there. You want me to check the mailbox in case I got an invitation?”

“You are _not_ helping.”  
  
“Well, I’m sorry, but I can’t do much when your problem is this ridiculous,” Nina says. “Look. You’ve been speaking to them basically every day since you arrived. I know for a fact they both worship the ground you walk on. They’ve been driving for actual days, that’s how bad they wanna see you, when they coulda just played the no-flying card and waited for you to go back to Manhattan. And by the way, even if they _did_ want to do the monogamy thing, that decision is definitely not contingent on whether I put my damn mug on a coaster so how about calm down and just look forward to having a good time with them?”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Vanessa sulks.

“You’re welcome,” Nina says, and moves her mug from the coaster to the table.

***

The car comes to a stop outside a row of houses in the outskirts of residential Los Gatos and Usnavi’s all but ready to bust through the passenger door Kool-Aid Man style before Ruben says “this isn’t her place yet.”

Usnavi makes a despairing noise as Ruben leans into the backseat to grab his bag. “What? Then why are we _stopping_? We’re nearly there!”

“Yes, and we just spent all day in a car driving through a desert.” Ruben takes a can of deodorant out of his bag and shoves his hand up his shirt to spray himself liberally with it. “Is _car sex and sweat_ really the first impression we want her to have after all this time?”

Usnavi considers it. “Can I borrow that?”

Ruben hands the deodorant over, flips down the rogue side of Usnavi’s collar that always pops up of its own accord, then checks himself out in the rearview mirror. “Does my hair look okay?”

“Looks great. Wait—“ Usnavi shifts one errant lock of sidesweeping bangs that’s trying to go the wrong direction back into place. “There. Perfect. Do I got anything in my teeth?”

“No, you’re good.” Ruben digs around in his bag again, pulls out a packet of breath mints, dropping one into Usnavi’s hand and one into his own. “Okay. Looking good, smelling good, are you ready?”

"Been ready, hermoso." Usnavi pops the mint into his mouth and says around it, “let's go get our girl.”

***

After about the fifth time in an hour running outside at every passing car noise Vanessa gives up any pretence of cool and sits out on the steps up to their little two-storey apartment complex, waiting. Their building is on a small, residential road and thats something she’s never got used to, something she thinks Usnavi will commiserate with her on when he gets here. The distracting silence of a suburban nighttime. It leaves all her senses on edge, picking out the faint sound of a motorcycle streets away, every car that passes slowly by raising her hopes then when it inevitably isn’t them, she checks her phone. No messages. Still not here.

In the dark of this street at night, darker than New York city lights ever allow there’s only the faint glow of light from behind windows and blinds and curtains and the headlights of an oncoming car are almost blinding. Vanessa stares straight into them trying to see inside to no luck. It’s moving at a slowly searching pace but doesn’t look like it’s stopping, then just as she thinks it’s about to pass by, the door opens and someone half-leaps, half-trips out of the passenger side.

Vanessa’s on her feet: there’s only one person she knows who’s impatient enough to jump out of a moving car. As she runs down the steps Usnavi’s there to meet her at the bottom, catching her as she leaps at him with a shriek. He tries to say something, but if he thinks she’s gonna wait one more minute to kiss him then he’s a goddamn idiot, and after a messy teeth-bumping second he gets the message, kissing her back as hard as if he’s trying to make up for all the ones they’ve missed.

“Usnavi,” she says, not taking her mouth off his. He makes an excited _mmmmn!_ sound in response. “UsnaviUsnaviUsnavi!”

“I'm also here,” an amused voice says behind her.

Vanessa unwraps herself from Usnavi to turn and grab Ruben by the front of his t-shirt instead, her head so full of stars she can’t even think what she wants to do with him now he’s here. “ _Ruben!”_

Ruben strokes her hair out of her face delicately, staring into her eyes as if he doesn’t quite believe it’s her, then in a sudden movement hugs her right off her feet again, spinning her in a delighted circle with a loud laugh. When he sets her down he says, “hey, Vanessa,” quiet and adoring, and she says “hey” and touches his cheek, the scruff of his beard, leaning forward into his chest. Usnavi at her back embraces her, murmuring "oh, we missed you _so_ much, mi amor.”

“Obviously,” she says, nestled blissfully between them and happier than she can ever remember being. It’s just like she’s been saying the whole time: nothing to be nervous about. Not when Vanessa’s boys are back with her, right where they belong.


End file.
